Permission marketing Vs Interruption marketing

M.Manoj prabhakar
L.G. Prabhu
S.Vasand
C.Vinodh kumar
Abstract
Permission marketing was popularized by Seth Godin in 1999. In this type of marketing
customer provides the permission to receive certain type of promotional offers. Here the
brands offer an opportunity for customers to volunteer to be marketed to. Main positive
aspect of permission marketing is that it guarantees that consumer pay more attention to the
marketing message. It allows the marketer to express their messages slowly and calmly. The
traditional approach that is followed in marketing is otherwise known as interruption
marketing. It is named so as it interrupts consumers routine work schedule and delivers the
message. As the clutter of brands is increasing with lightning speed, it is highly impossible to
capture the attention of consumer in interruption marketing unlike permission marketing.
This paper clearly explains the contrast between the two approaches and explains the
conceptual model of permission marketing.
Introduction
What does marketing aims at? What do the brands expect from the customers? Marketing
mainly aims at grabbing the valuable attention of customers. It expects the customers to pay
attention towards their marketing messages they deliver. Internet has become an important
Platform for many brands to convey their message and grab the eyeballs of customers. Clutter
is a big problem in World Wide Web. Internet pages are increasing beyond imagination. For
example, the bow tie research study by IBM, Compaq and Alta Vista reports sampling over
600 million pages and the search engine, Google, claims to index over a billion pages. Search
engines and Internet portals were attempts at helping consumers navigate through this clutter.
But when individuals search for information at these places, they are presented with hundreds
of selections. Consumers will not go through all selections and are most likely to focus on the
first few results. Hence, search engine optimization has become an important research area.
However, due to heterogeneity in the algorithms used by search engines, it is not always
possible for ones site to be featured in the top few. Therefore, it is clear that search engines
alone will not help consumers find sites relevant to their needs. Increasingly, search engines
tap into smaller and smaller fractions of the overall Web with no engine capturing more than
16% of the Web content. Email is still one of the cost effective way to contact the customers.
It is cheaper than the usual traditional approaches that in followed in marketing. According to
American management association more than half of the marketers rely on E mail. Growth of

E mail and internet usage led to a new approach to marketing which is known as Permission
marketing
Interruption marketing
The traditional approach that is followed is called as Interruption marketing. Because the key
idea of all adds is to interrupt what the viewers are doing in order to get them to think about
something else. Advertising according to Seth Godin is The science of creating and placing
media that interrupts the customer and get him or her to take some action. But without
interruption there wont be any action and without action advertising flops. The marketplace
for advertising is becoming more and more cluttered. So it became increasingly difficult
interrupt the customer. Every day we are exposed to more amount of media. Most of them are
optimized to interrupt what we are doing. And it is getting increasingly harder to find a little
peace and quiet. Brands offer products from womb to tomb. They go in for mass advertising
to capture the eyeballs of customer and to grab their attention. There are advertisements from
airports to urinals. It is highly impossible for customers to pay attention to every
advertisement they come across.
Permission marketing
Permission marketing makes a lot of sense compared to spam mails. Sender of spam realizes
two things. Firstly the cost of obtaining a new E mail address is minimal and so the marginal
cost of obtaining a new additional customer is nearly zero. There are various software
programs to obtain E mail addresses from websites for no cost. Moreover these marketers get
into deceptive practises. Therefore many marketers have slowly adopted permission
marketing. Though this idea of customer initiated marketing is a new one it is closely related
to two marketing concepts. Relationship marketing by Sheth and Parvatiyar in 1995 and oneto-one marketing by Peppers and Rogers in 1993 are closely related to the concept of
permission marketing. Relationship marketing proposes that marketers should focus on long
term relationship with customers rather than single transaction. The core idea of one-to-one
marketing is that marketers must think of segment of size one and customize the marketing
mix to each customer. Permission marketing builds on relationship marketing and one-to-one
marketing by adding a new twist known as customer-initiated-targeting. Some scholars
believe that when customers target marketers and control the term of relationship it will lead
to increased attention and thereby will result in increased participation.
Permission can also be used as a metric to evaluate a companys customer databases.
Consider two customer databases. Databases 1 has been assembled by customers providing
the firm permission to send them marketing offers from other companies. Database 2 has
been put together by customers not giving permission to share any information or any
promotional messages to them. The level permission provided to the marketers is greater in
Database 1. As a result, it is worth more. This is big issue for Internet-based-companies such
as Amazon.com that have claimed that their real asset is their customer database.
Five steps of permission marketing

Permission marketing is anticipated, relevant, personal marketing tool. It is anticipated as

customers are ready to hear from the marketers. It is personal because each message are
directly related to the customer. It is relevant because the customers have opted in and they
are interested in. There are five important steps in permission marketing. They are as follows
Brands should offer incentives to the customer for volunteering. Marketers have to
offer something that keeps the customer interested in.
Marketers should make use of the initial attention offered by the customer and offer a
curriculum over time, teaching the customer about their product/service.
Reinforce the incentives to make sure that the attention continues. Since this two way
dialogue, marketers can adjust the incentives being offered and fine tune them for
each customer.
Marketers have to offer additional incentives to acquire even more permission from
the customer.
Over time, leverage the permission to change consumer behaviour towards profit.
Permission marketings conceptual models
Permission marketing occurs as four different models based on the permission intensity.
Model 1 is characterized as direct relationship maintenance. In this case the customer
provides small amount of information as it is asked by the marketers. This is do not get the
customer exposed to much of marketing messages from the respective company. It only
serves as an additional service offered by the company. This characterized by low permission
intensity and minimal targeting. This type of approach is not much of a use to marketer and
the customer as well.
Model 2 can be described as permission partnership. In this the customer provides a portal or
media site with permission to send him promotional messages. After receiving the
permission, the intermediary alerts it partners who wants to send marketing messages to the
customer. As a result the entire customers who have opted in will receive the mails regarding
the promotional offers. Nytimes.com and lycos.com comes under this category. Maind
drawback of this model is that it increases traffic to the website. Hence here we have low to
medium permission intensity and low targeting.
Model 3 can be described as an ad market. A customer provides an intermediary with detailed
information about his tastes and preferences. The intermediary finds the advertisers with this
information provided by the customers. Consumers win by reducing clutter and are paid to
participate in the process, advertisers find target customers for their promotions with lower
cost of targeting and the intermediary makes a profit by facilitating this exchange. Hence,
here we have high permission intensity, contact through an intermediary and the potential for
high targeting precision. Mypoints.com and chooseyourmail.com comes under this category.
Model 4 can be described as a permission pool. Here, different consumers provide different
firms with the permission to send them promotional offers. These firms pool the information
provided by the consumer and then promotional messages are sent out targeting this larger
pool. Examples of this practice include yesmail.com. The difference between model 1 and the
rest is that in the former, an individual firm directly transacts with its customers while in
Model 2, an intermediary such as a portal plays this role and in Models 3 and 4, an
intermediary matches consumer demand for ads with firm ad supply. Naturally, since it may

be inefficient for a consumer to sign up with several firms in the manner of model 1, the other
models are likely to be more common.
Advertiser

Customer

Partner 1

Partner 2

Portal/Media Site

Consumer

Mm
Partner 3

Advertiser 1

Advertiser 2

Infomediary

Consumer

Advertiser 3

Partner 1

Consumer

Advertiser 2

Infomediary

Consumer

Advertiser 3

Partner 2

Consumer

Advertiser 1