Quality or quantity? Audience coverage or the pinpoint strike?

What is more important now – quality or quantity – perennial question, occupying thousands of marketer’s minds! Wide audience coverage or the pinpoint strike? In data collecting era – we can minimize the waste of funds and focus directly on our target group. Why swatting a fly with a sledgehammer? Nowadays we have a great opportunity and a huge choice of marketing methods to learn everything about our every single consumer. Why not to use it to make business more personalized and to establish long term relationships with the customer? Especially if we are talking about web environment, where we can employ low cost online tools – social media, SEO, e-mails etc. Let me tell you a bit about it…

Did you hear something about “Permission marketing”? This is when you, being an advertiser, respect the time and the choice of your potential clients and holding your marketing communications only with their permission. It’s the opposite term to “Interruption marketing“– when the main aim – is to win people’s attention – no matter what. This method became less popular today – because the average consumer come into contact with 1 million advertisements per year – which is nearly 3000 per day! This is too much! We are constantly overloaded! We are not paying any attention to all this!  It’s the defensive reaction to this pressure! So many marketers were patiently waiting for somebody to invent new generation strategy.  “Permission marketing” – Seth Godin’s term. He says that it’s “turning strangers into friends and friends into customers”.

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.

Seth Godin

The 5 Levels of Permission Marketing

(from the lowest to the highest effectiveness)

Situational Permission:

The prospect permits the business to come into contact by providing their personal information.

Brand Trust:

The prospect permits the business to continue supplying their needs.

Personal Relationship:

The prospect’s permission is granted because of a personal relationship that he/she has with someone in the provider organization.

Points Permission:

At this stage, the customer has agreed to receive goods or services and has allowed the business to collect their personal data. This is usually because they are provided with incentives, such as exchangeable points or an opportunity to earn a prize.

Intravenous Permission:

The supplier has now taken over the supply function for a specific good or a service; the customer is completely dependent on the business.

At each successive level of the permission framework, the business achieves a higher efficiency state, with a decrease in the marketing cost. Thus, businesses usually aim to achieve the “intravenous permission” level. However, the 5 levels of permission should not be considered as a necessary sequential process, as more than one level could apply simultaneously depending on the nature of the business.

Now we are witnessing the transformation, evolution of the whole market idea. Permission marketing is similar to what Philip Kotler is talking about in his Marketing 3.0. conception. Keep the nose to the wind – not to lose the game! Having as many tools as we have now to control and to rule consumer’s behavior – it’s not very hard to do!