Godin's permission marketing thinking applies to Direct Mail, telemarketing and face to face situations. He quotes McD's "Do you want fries with that?" as the most six most profitable permission marketing words in the world. In chapter 9 he applies Permission based marketing to the web and has some good advice. For other books that add value in this area, take a look at Fred.Newell's "Loyalty.com" and Patricia Seybold's "Customer.com"
I also found the evaluation section - Chapter 11 - and the Frequently asked questions in Chapter 12 useful. On page 239/40 of my edition there is a simple but compelling checklist of 12 things to do to put Permission marketing into practice. That is the essence of the book, and I recommend it to you
Like Cluetrain, Permission Marketing begins from the premise that corporations need to understand how people actually live. Above all, we're busy. We have heard it all. We have caller ID, mute buttons, and a million other devices intended to shelter us from the cacaphony.
The opposite of interruption marketing, of course, is marketing to consumers who have explicitly given their permission to be contacted. Since Godin lays out a number of highly original and ground-breaking ideas, many of which foreshadowed the huge boom in the development of opt-in email lists, those who do any kind of e-mail marketing will be on shaky ground unless they've read Godin.
Unfortunately, the manner in which corporations have interpreted the idea of permission-based marketing boils down to a heavy dose of email to their customers, email which often violates Godin's stipulations that communications should be personal, anticipated, and relevant.
Godin is willing to take his share of the blame for how the promise of permission marketing got distorted, and turned our email inboxes into battlegrounds ("Permission Marketers: Did We Blow It?"). Arguably, the problem lies to some extent in the lack of plausibility of Godin's original formulation of the concept and principles of permission. His indictment of intrusive mass marketing is unimpeachable, but there is an over-optimism on the permission marketing side of the argument. Consumers don't give so-called permission nearly as cheerfully as Godin's original argument let on. Yahoo, which had hired Godin for a brief period to be its VP of Permission Marketing, is now learning that it's easier to theorize about securing customers' permission than it is to actually do it.
The failure of companies like Yahoo! to profitably implement these principles, and the relative success of "club 'em over the head" methods employed by their competitor AOL, seem to be cause for despair. Surely, if any of this stuff is true, companies like AOL would crumble as consumers tuned out the noise. So far, that hasn't happened. Good old interruption marketing lives on. To millions of viewers, the commercials during the Super Bowl are not an intrusion, they're "destination television." Maybe what Godin has discovered is not a universal principle of the advertising business, but rather the fact that those residing in higher socioeconomic strata have more options for tuning out the noise, and more cultural and professional motivations for doing so. If that's all it is, it's still an important contribution, since many businesses - especially those in the technology industry - market to a more upscale demographic.
Ultimately, Godin's approach can explain some things, but he fails to acknowledge the continued success of major brands like Budweiser and Gillette, who have continued to win the battle to stay first in the mind of their mass market. If Godin had to do it all over again, Permission Marketing might have done well to bill itself as a manual for marketing to highly discerning professionals in a B2B environment, and how to break through to "opinion leaders" and journalists as opposed to customers per se. But then again, that more specialized focus would have prevented the book from becoming a bestseller.
In my opinion, it does a good job of outlining what the marketer should already know: dangle the carrot and let the customer nibble. As you develop a relationship, bring out other items until you have fierce brand loyalty. The ultimate goal is to be able to do this well on a massive basis. That's the hard part.
The book is much more plausible and better written than Regis McKenna's "Real Time," and the inspiration behind the Clue Train Manifesto ....P>I would very much be interested in the followup in 2003, after the dot-com spiral has run its course and there are some better examples of companies who have employed these concepts over time.
I am trying to continue my reading on e-mail marketing before launching my e-business and I have found Mr. Godin's books to be very easy to read and have me saying "That's why so and so does this and that...."
Conclusion: A must read, definitely worth the money.
Anyone that is interested in marketing should also look into Robert Cialdini's Influence, and The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Reis and Jack Trout. I would also read one or two books on viral marketing. Mr. Godin's unleashing the ideavirus is the best that I have read and I have heard good things about Anatomy of a Buzz by Emmanual Rosen. I have read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and thought it wasn't as well written as Mr. Godin's book.