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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Permission and Remarkability in a Virtuous Cycle

Permission is anticipated, personal, and relevant

More than twenty years ago, in Permission Marketing, I narrated the beginning of a revolution.

It’s about attention. Scarce attention.

Marketers had been stealing it, abusing it, and wasting it.

Spam was free, so spam some more. Spam, spam, spam.

Email spam, sure, but all sorts of spam. Constant efforts to steal our attention and precious time, which we can’t get back.

There’s an alternative. The privilege of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

That hardly seems controversial, but it was. It got me thrown out of the Direct Marketing Association.

What I saw twenty-five years ago was that spam didn’t scale. That attention was truly precious, and selfish marketers needed to stop stealing something that humans couldn’t make any more of.

My team and I built a company around this idea. At one point, Yoyodyne was sending, receiving, and processing more email than anyone else on the planet . . . and we were doing it with the active permission of every person we engaged with. Our open rates were over 70 percent and our emails averaged a 33 percent response rate.

That’s about a thousand times the rate of a typical commercial email sent in 2018.

Before paying for ads, then, long before that, begin with the idea of earning this asset. The privilege of talking to people who would miss you if you were gone.

Permission marketing 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.

Pay attention is a key phrase here, because permission marketers understand that when someone chooses to pay attention they actually are paying you with something valuable. And there’s no way they can get their attention back if they change their mind. Attention becomes an important asset, something to be valued, not wasted.

Real permission is different from presumed or legalistic permission. Just because you somehow get my email address doesn’t mean you have permission to use it. Just because I don’t complain doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because it’s in the fine print of your privacy policy doesn’t mean it’s permission either.

Real permission works like this: If you stop showing up, people are concerned. They ask where you went.

Permission is like dating. You don’t start by asking for the sale at first impression. You earn the right, over time, bit by bit.

One of the key drivers of permission marketing, in addition to the scarcity of attention, is the extraordinarily low cost of connecting with people who want to hear from you. Drip by drip, message by message. Each contact is virtually free.

RSS and email and other techniques mean you don’t have to worry about stamps or network ad buys every time you have something to say. Home delivery is the milkman’s revenge: it’s the essence of permission.

Facebook and other social platforms seem like a shortcut, because they make it apparently easy to reach new people. But the tradeoff is that you’re a sharecropper. It’s not your land. You don’t have permission to contact people; they do. You don’t own an asset; they do.

Every publisher, every media company, every author of ideas needs to own a permission asset, the privilege of contacting people without a middleman.

Permission doesn’t have to be formal, but it must be obvious. My friend has permission to call me if he needs to borrow five dollars, but the person you meet at a trade show has no such ability to pitch you his entire resume, even though he paid to get in.

Subscriptions are an overt act of permission. That’s why home delivery newspaper readers are so valuable, and why magazine subscribers are worth more than newsstand readers.

In order to get permission, you make a promise. You say, “I will do x, y, and z; I hope you will give me permission by listening.” And then—this is the hard part—that’s all you do. You don’t assume you can do more. You don’t sell the list or rent the list or demand more attention. You can promise a newsletter and talk to me for years, you can promise a daily RSS feed and talk to me every three minutes, you can promise a sales pitch every day (the way internet retailer Woot does). But the promise is the promise until both sides agree to change it. You don’t assume that just because you’re running for President or coming to the end of the quarter or launching a new product that you have the right to break the deal. You don’t.

Permission doesn’t have to be a one-way broadcast medium. The internet means you can treat different people differently, and it demands that you figure out how to let your permission base choose what they hear and in what format.

If it sounds like you need humility and patience to do permission marketing, that’s because it does. That’s why so few companies do it properly. The best shortcut, in this case, is no shortcut at all.

How many people would reach out and wonder (or complain) if you didn’t send out that next email blast? That’s a metric worth measuring and increasing.

Once you earn permission, you can educate. You have enrollment. You can take your time and tell a story. Day by day, drip by drip, you can engage with people. Don’t just talk at them; communicate the information that they want.

Shortly after Permission Marketing was published, Dany Levy started an email newsletter called DailyCandy. It was a city-focused email alert for young women looking for local sales, parties, and connections. The asset was so valuable that she ended up selling it for more than a hundred million dollars.

And every podcaster has an asset like this, a subscriber base that regularly listens to the latest show.

And every successful politician has an asset like this, a group of activist voters eager to hear the next riff and share it or take action.

Protect it. It’s more valuable than the laptops or chairs in your office. If someone walked out the door with those, you’d fire them. Act the same way if someone on your team spams the list just to make a metric go up.

Earn your own permission and own it

When we use a social media platform because it has plenty of users built in, we’re not really building an asset.

Sure, for now you can reach your followers on this platform. But over time, the platform makes money by charging you, not by giving away their work.

And so you’ll need to boost a post. Or worry about what happens when the platform tries to increase its stock price.

If permission is at the heart of your work, earn it and keep it. Communicate only with those who choose to hear from you. The simplest definition of permission is the people who would miss you if you didn’t reach out.

You should own that, not rent it.

Tuma Basa and RapCaviar

In 2015, in a defensive move, Spotify hired music tastemaker Tuma Basa to compete with Apple’s new initiative in DJ-curated playlists. Basa took over the RapCaviar playlist and within months, it had grown to more than three million subscribers. Those are listeners who have given permission to Spotify (and Basa) to share new music with them.

Within three years, he had grown the list to nine million people.

He built the most important asset in the music business. Bigger than any radio station. More important than any magazine.

When Basa profiles a new artist, she becomes a superstar (that’s a money move, Cardi B). Every Friday morning, the playlist is updated, and by the end of the day, the landscape of hit music has changed.

Spotify doesn’t need to own radio spectrum, or a magazine. They own a permission asset instead. Permission, attention, and enrollment drive commerce.

Showing up with generosity

How do you get permission in the first place? How do you connect with people who want to hear more from you?

The worldview of those who care about new things (the neophiliacs) drives them to seek out new voices, new ideas, and new options. There aren’t a lot of these folks in your market, but there may be enough of them.

When Marvel wants to launch a new superhero franchise, they don’t begin with nationwide TV ads. Instead, they go to San Diego Comic-Con.

The Comic-Con has permission. Permission from raving fans, neophiliac fans, to break new ideas, to help them find the next big thing.

That’s the place to launch Deadpool. Not with a pitch, but with generosity.

A special coming attraction.

An interview with the director.

Actual news.

The movie’s not coming out for a year. They’re not there to sell tickets. They’re there to earn permission. To gain attention over time, to earn the privilege of telling their story to people who want to hear it.

Mostly, it’s a signal. A way of telling the core of the tribe that attention has been paid, that this is the sort of thing people like us will be talking about next year.

It doesn’t matter that there’s only a tiny percentage of the movie market at Comic-Con. What matters is the quality of their story and the depth of their empathy and generosity.

And then, if they’ve done it right, the word will spread.

Transform your project by being remarkable

It’s almost impossible to spread your word directly. Too expensive, too slow. To find individuals, interrupt them, and enroll them, one by one . . . it’s a daunting task.

The alternative is to intentionally create a product or service that people decide is worth talking about.

I call this a Purple Cow.

It’s worth noting that whether something is remarkable isn’t up to you, the creator. You can do your best, but the final decision is up to your user, not you.

If they remark on it, then it’s remarkable.

If they remark on it, the word spreads.

If the conversations move your mission forward, then others will engage with your idea and the process continues.

Easier said than done.

You must do it with intent, building it deep into the product or service.

That means that effective marketers are also in charge of the experience that the customers have.

Offensive/juvenile/urgent/selfish is not the same thing as purple

Too often, impatient marketers resort to stunts. Stunts come from a place of selfishness.

You do people a service when you make better things and make it easy to talk about them. The best reason someone talks about you is because they’re actually talking about themselves: “Look at how good my taste is.” Or perhaps, “Look at how good I am at spotting important ideas.” On the other hand, if we’re going to criticize you, censure you, talk about how you’ve crossed a line, we’re doing that to send a signal to our friends and neighbors. That you’re to be shunned, that you’re making things worse. We’re not impressed by how much money you spent, what lines you crossed, or how important the work is to you.

No, we spread the word when it benefits us, our taste, our standing, our desire for novelty and change.

Suspending Fight Club rules

Chuck Palahniuk wrote that the first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club.

As soon as the right sort of character (worldview!) in the novel heard about Fight Club, that rule was an invitation to talk about Fight Club. And, as it grew, so did the conversations. Metcalfe’s Law again.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a huge organization. And it’s hardly anonymous. Built into the practice of an active member is the posture that, when in doubt, we talk about AA, because talking about it is a generous act. It’s a shame killer. It’s a life raft. It’s a fellowship of connection, a chance to do for others what was done for you.

Ideas travel horizontally now: from person to person, not from organization to customer. We begin with the smallest possible core and give them something to talk about and reason to do so.

What we choose to market is up to us. If the change you seek to make can’t be talked about, perhaps you should find a different change worth making.

Designing for evangelism

Some members of AA bring tension to nonmembers. They eagerly (and generously) approach people with a drinking problem and offer to help.

Social pressure made us ill, they may think, and social pressure can make us better.

Evangelism is difficult. Bringing tension to a coworker or friend is fraught with risk. It’s easier to avoid.

The hard work of creating the change you seek begins with designing evangelism into the very fabric of what you’re creating. People aren’t going to spread the word because it’s important to you. They’ll only do it because it’s important to them. Because it furthers their goals, because it permits them to tell a story to themselves that they’re proud of.