May I have your permission please?

Ever missed that small tick-box that allows particular softwares being downloaded from the net onto your computer, to access your usage data? Have you ever read the entire three page long description of the ‘I Agree’ section when you register on a particular service offering’s website? Chances are you haven’t like the rest of the majority who don’t fancy wasting their time on such nuances. The repercussions of which can be a flood of e-mails in your inbox the very next day, the kind that mostly end up in your junk folder.

The communication mix that reaches out to today’s consumers is mostly cluttered and unorganized. The prime reason for this being the lack of innovation on the marketer’s front and the lack of time on the consumer’s side which leads to the marketer pushing everything hoping that something will work. Consumers have learnt to live with advertising and even ignore the bombardment of messages that they are exposed to daily. So, the interruption model doesn’t quite work.

Even as you watch that half an hour long favorite soap on your television, a minimum of ten minutes are taken by the advertisements that repeatedly try to appeal to you.  While you are out on a picnic with your friends, you are supposedly hounded by phone calls from telemarketers who are trying to give you last minute offers for their products. Can you even recall three commercials you saw on television last night and even if you do can you associate them with the products they were marketing? The average individual will see more than one million messages in a year that works out to an average of almost three thousand per day. The irony of the situation is that when you can’t remember even three you saw last night, three thousand is a pretty distant location. As traditional media methods become more expensive and less effective, marketers are searching for new ways to develop their marketing methods.

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Welcome to the era of Permission Marketing, which as Seth Godin maintains is the exact opposite of traditional interruption marketing. It is no longer necessary to fight for individual attention by exposing them to a variety of messages that they would anyways end up confusing. Permission marketing lies on the foundation of relationship building which instead focuses on attracting individuals voluntarily and turning them into loyal consumers. Permission marketing has no scope for interruptions. Instead of pushing your communication towards your prospects, you do so to the ones who give you their permission to do so. As such the prospects are interested in a company’s products and would like to know more about it.