Net Present Value

Most books about marketing leave us positively hypothermic

As a genre, they do give a problem to the sensitive reader : for they are about people, but not about life. How many of us non-economists can still read Krugman or Galbraith? How many of us non-scientists can still read Dawkins or Kurzweil? But just how appetising to the even the well-read intellectual is the latest best-seller from marketing gurudom?

Get with it. Marketing literature has to be the ultimate oxy for morons. It's an orthodoxy of a paradoxy (please, reader, stay with this...). For the art of selling things better to people must reify them along the way, no? To sell better is better to manage the exclusion of human whimsy, spontaneity, control... To sell better is to professionalise guile. Sure, it makes the markets spin, but it rarely makes for an edifying, humanising mental encounter. Marketing books are the equivalent of the old Country & Western music charts : exciting only to the most colourful anoraks, deeply suspicious to the fashionably well-informed.

So, how pleasant to know Mr. Godin. Who has written such volumes of stuff! We will cheerfully excuse him the silly, spooky sub-title which seems positively designed to repel bookstore browsers. (Who really wants to turn friends into customers?). Of course, it is a book about how to sell things more efficiently. But, more intriguingly, it is a marketing handbook that offers all manner of rounded reflections about how powerful, sophisticated, seen-it-all-before consumers relate to and draw value from the whole business of capitalism.

We will put the core question more bluntly : just how much more conventional advertising will we, as sentient beings, actually take? Look at how much advertising spend still goes on carpet-bombing, blitzing the poor consumer with unwanted (or, at least, un-requested) messages, remorselessly bludgeoning us to pay attention. How many more un-desired promotional calls will we take, just as the children are being put to bed, from telephone companies or credit card firms or kitchen manufacturers .... ? Just how many un-prompted e-mails will we want from cyber-hawkers offering services we do not want from companies we do not know? Just how many new car commercials on TV will we actually watch all the way through? Just how many more pitches for pizzas, for plumbers, for picture-framers, for palm-readers - as they pile ever higher on our doormat - will we keep ignoring, keep discarding, keep hating? "The overwhelming clutter in the market-place", says Seth Godin, "has made traditional advertising almost worthless for most marketers". Now there is a thought.

But just how far in the remorselessly conventional world of advertising does this thought actually carry? Zillions are still being spent in campaigns whose only hope is to win a few micro-seconds within our ever-shrinking attention span, again and again and again.... Meanwhile, the Internet - the primary vehicle for "permission" as opposed to "interruption" marketing - offers the prospect of genuinely customised approaches to real human beings. The basic thesis is that, increasingly, brands will have to reward both potential and active customers in some meaningful way if they are to win attention and build buying commitment. In other words, consumers will have to be paid to give attention to an advertisement. Because the Internet can deliver this in all manner of exciting devices, so the old marketing idioms will wither.

Too much has been made about the dangers of companies knowing too much about us and our spending behaviour. For if we trust a particular and are happy to let it track what and how we consume over the years, then what is in prospect is a genuine economy for all : advertising that, in non-invasive ways, offers us things we may indeed want; a basis for loyalty and repeat purchases achieved at an ever declining marketing cost; measurable results for corporate spending and a personalised portfolio of pro-active brands for customers. A consommation devoutly to be wished.

The best part of this book lies in the author's willingness to link theories of marketing success to the changes in consumer psychology born of rising wealth, a sense of saturation with conventional ads, our experience of being able to tailor the world around us to suit our tastes and our whimsies... This all makes for a rather thrilling read. One famous French marketing theologian once described conventional marketing as "...the continuous re-seduction of potential infidels". We wish we had ourselves invented the phrase; we wish we had written this book. For "Permission Marketing" is essentially about ending waste within our contemporary culture of buying and selling. Seth Godin, along the way, tells us more about the direction of modern capitalism - and the marvel that is its interaction with new technology - than any other effort we have read in ages.