Don’t frame your message as useless by viewing your marketing as “permission based”

Posted by Anders Colding-Jørgensen on september 30, 2009 under Facebook, Marketing, Psykologi | Be the First to Comment

The basic principle of permission based marketing

The basic principle of permission based marketing

Choosing a strategic approach to your online marketing does not only map out the field and goals (the why) for the tactics that will follow (the how). When you set a strategy, you also imply some basic assumptions  about your organisation and your relation to your outside world. In Goffman’s terms:  you subscribe to a framing of the situation, that will guide your understanding of what is going on.

A very common strategic framework is that of “permission”. The basic idea is that you should try to achieve people’s permission to send them your marketing material. This mindset is being pushed by over rated bald guru types such as Seth Godin (link to his blog) but is also supported by our legal frameworks: you simply need permission, of you want to send people stuff.

But let’s take a look at how permission based strategies frame the situation.

What logically happens if you frame your messages as something that people need to permit you to send them, is that your message is framed as something they don’t want or need. The other logical consequence of this framing is that people are framed as passive and you as active. So what does that do to your understanding of your own job?

In this framing of the situation, your job is to manipulate passive people who don’t want your message into accepting to get it anyway. In other words: permission based marketing will put you in a perfect spot to do all the wrong things on social platforms like Facebook, because it will effectively prevent you from seeing what is going on!

Re-framing the relation between you and your potential customers

But you don’t have to be stuck in a permission based frame. There are other ways of framing the situation. One of them is to stop asking for permission. NOW! In stead, you could begin to understand what people need online and start building your marketing strategy around that. Most people build their identity online with lots of cultural objects – and for many, most of these objects are commercial! This means that millions of people are sitting at their computers right now, actively joining fan pages on Facebook, sharing videos, web pages and links to all sorts of products and companies. Links they spent time digging out themselves (or received via friends), and are sharing as active, interested net users. These links are shared because they provide some kind of value and because they will help people express them selves! Not because someone got permission to spam them!

What if you began to view your marketing as a social value provision?

What would that do to the framing of your potential customers, your relation to them and your marketing messages? First of all, this framing implies that people are active – not passive- and you and your potential customers will be allies – joined together by the common goal of helping people to create the best image of themselves online. This will render you a provider of social value and your marketing messages will be positive and valuable contributions.

To do this, you need to obtain a slightly more sophisticated psychological model of your potential customer, than the one needed for permission based marketing. In stead of viewing people as two eyeballs producing a binary “permission/no permission output”, you need to begin to understand why people join or share stuff online. This is what I mainly blog about. And even though I rarely quote theory in my posts, it is often embedded in the framework behind them.

You can begin re-framing with my two previous posts:

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