Did Jesus Get Killed for Practicing Interruption Marketing?

Yesterday, I tried to convince a few people that we must stop interrupting when we prepare marketing messages, especially online and with search marketing, which is my jurisdiction. Being a search marketing expert, my job is to help online consumers make choices when they read search results. I have to explain & inform them what’s on the site and describe how I can help them. I have to be user centric to do this right. I also need to follow a permission marketing scheme. I hope online users will give me permission to market to them. It is a simple concept and yet, I don’t understand how it is so difficult for traditional marketing people to “get” this. This is the first and foremost aspect I want people to get before they start doing search.

Despite my effort to explain how to structure the search program we were talking about with the right philosophy, I was after all invited to meeting, I have to admit it wasn’t a pleasant meeting. There was a lot of resistance. Of course, I was somewhat mad and disappointed to realize how short sighted people can be. They fear change. They don’t want to reconsider their position, even in search marketing. Today, as I was researching definition and examples to illustrate my point, I came across an excellent article called “Did Jesus get Killed for Practicing Interruption Marketing?” Wow. This is pretty awesome. According to the author: “if Jesus would have practiced Permission Marketing rather than Interruption Marketing, he probably wouldn’t have gotten himself murdered by religious politicians just fighting to hold things together--some things haven’t changed in two thousand years.”

Here is an excerpt which makes an overview of the 2 concepts, which I think is helpful:

“I’m reading Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing and he brings up the difference between Interruption Marketing and Permission Marketing.
Interruption Marketing is when you interrupt people from what they are doing in order to ask them to pay attention to something else.
Permission Marketing is when you build your product around a consumer base that is expressing a need that you design your product to fulfill.”

If you want to know more about these concepts, where asking for permission represents a new trend for interacting with consumers, you can read Bryan Eisenberg’s latest book, Waiting for your Cat to Bark as well as Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. In my opinion, if you want to succeed online, especially in search marketing, you MUST understand what permission marketing is and you have to willing to implement its core principles in everything you write for being granted the privilege to market to your potential customers. 

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Comments

1. I heard Seth Godin was “the ultimate entrepreneur for the information age” (thanks, BusinessWeek).

   Tell me, does he like scrambled eggs and bacon in the morning?

   In all seriousness, though, what specifically regarding what Seth Godin dubs as Permission Marketing (which he surely does not have a patent on) do you think should influence how search marketing itself is done? It’s nice to preach about how interruptions suck in an attention-deprived market and to jump on the media 2.0 bandwagon, but it doesn’t say much about what you think.

   Isn’t search marketing, by strict definition, _not_ interruption marketing? In other words, complementing a user’s experience by adding to (as opposed to taking away from) what he is already seeking is a positive thing from the perspective of the “Permission Marketing” advocate.  If you’re preaching PermissionMarketing to people who advocate search marketing, aren’t you preaching to the choir?

   respek,
   b

   Posted by Bosko on 04/05 at 08:04 AM

2. Answering your questions, it has always been clear to me that search marketing follows a permission marketing philosophy. Let me explain. Since consumers are in control and can enter (or leave) a site in matter of seconds, when they click on a link in search results, they give permission to the company it represents and are opening up to be marketed to (in the form of the website they are about to visit). Consumers can extend or end this exchange whenever they want and they are frequently using this right. They can claim back permission by leaving the site. They control who and how long they give permission to.

   Therefore, whenever they click on something, they are opening up for a new interaction and give a small amount of permission, until they know enough about the offer and then make a decision based on their level of interest. They might stick around longer, take action or leave the site. Search Marketing is the first step in a long sequence of steps in relationship building where consumers are prompted to give more permission, until a final action is taken. AB

   Posted by Alexandre Brabant on 04/09 at 09:08 AM