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Permission marketing gains long-term support

Lawrence Uebel

Saul Alinsky, a famous American activist during the 1950s and 1960s, once had a plan for what he called "the world's first fart-in." He had been called to Rochester, N.Y., by a group called FIGHT, a popular representative of the minority black community in Rochester. FIGHT felt that Eastman Kodak, the city's primary business, had been practicing discriminatory hiring and refusing to deal with them. Alinksy wanted to create political pressure by hitting the upper class Rochester residents where it hurt: their artistic pride and joy, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. The plan was to buy tickets for 100 local blacks, serve them large portions of baked beans before a show and let nature take its course. Word of the tactic leaked, and, though not the sole cause, Kodak's resistance crumbled before it was implemented.

Protesting today is never as swift, creative or effective - in large part because it's cliché. It's boring. Despite the many worthy causes, none has gained the attention or momentum the great movements of the 1950s and 1960s did. Plenty of smart people take the easy out and blame this on popular apathy, but maybe there's something more complicated at work. Internet entrepreneur and marketing guru Seth Godin has recently popularized the term "permission marketing," which he opposes to the more traditional "interruption marketing." Interruption marketing is what most people think of when they hear the word "marketing:" commercials, promotions, fancy packaging - basically anything that gets in your face and attempts to manipulate you while you're trying to do something else. Permission marketing, on the other hand, means providing a highly useful service and then asking permission from (hopefully satisfied) customers to keep them informed about new products and services. The fundamental difference is respect: interruption marketing attempts to seize your attention, while permission marketing attempts to earn it.

Godin regularly argues that permission marketing is the future of business because larger companies can no longer monopolize consumer attention. TV is a perfect example. When you watch shows on the Internet or TiVo, you're no longer stuck watching commercials. As these forms of TV access become more common, commercials will become a less potent form of marketing. Causes (which, here, is an umbrella term for protests and non-profits) have a similar problem. Getting people involved was easier in the '50s and '60s because there were fewer distractions. Attention was a more abundant good.

During the recent Breast Cancer Awareness drive on campus, a girl stopped me on my way to class and handed me a pink ribbon pin. Considering it a worthwhile cause, I took one, but only thought about it briefly. It ended up at the bottom of my backpack for a few days, mostly because I had forgotten about it. The interaction hadn't been meaningful enough to really stick with me. I thought a few days later about an alternative that would have persuaded me not only to wear the pin but also to donate to the cause. If that same girl had showed up at my door during my downtime or engaged me when I was not in the middle of a pressing activity (I was late for class at the time of her interruption), the interaction would have been more meaningful and led to a much better outcome for her cause. It's not that I consider Breast Cancer Awareness any less important because of the way she went about it. It's that the interaction was so much less meaningful, I almost forgot about it entirely. It seemed like another annoyance on the way to class, like just another person handing out fliers I don't want.

This is important because simply taking a few minutes to talk shifts a brief experience with a vague, amorphous "cause" to a personal interaction with people with a cause who are asking for your help with something they care about. If we think of permission marketing and interruption marketing as a scale rather than a duality, such a method would clearly shift toward permission marketing, a far more effective technique in an attention-dry economy. So why does everyone go with pins and fliers and marches? Because interruption marketing is easier. It's easier to stand in one place than to walk from house to house or be on the lookout for idle passersby. (No matter what, causes will always require some level of interruption. If they didn't, there would be no need for them). Permission marketers have to be ready to maturely handle being turned down and they have to be sincere. Door-to-door has been around for decades, and if it comes accompanied with age-old false sincerity or lecturing, it won't do any good. (It also requires a cause worth hearing about to keep the door from being slammed in your face.)

Treating people like friends - or at least like human beings - instead of targets is the future of persuasion, because it creates renewable resources in the form of dedicated (or at least genuinely supportive) personnel. Mass rallies are outdated because they are easy to ignore and momentary. Without complementary personal efforts, "creating awareness" is only slightly more persuasive than bumper stickers. It leads to short-term commitment, which is inevitably far less useful than long-term, ingrained support.