Mark Sherrington on Permission Marketing

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In theory Apple, Google and others can – without your knowledge – monitor your behaviour and use this information for sinister marketing purposes. Everything you read or do, everywhere you go, everyone you know, can be fed to conniving marketers and used to manipulate you and sell you stuff. Mark Sherrington talks permission based marketing

In 1948 George Orwell wrote about a world in which every aspect of your life was monitored by Big Brother for the sinister purpose of manipulating your behaviour. He set it well into the future – 1984 – which as it turns out was 6 years before Tim Berners-Lee gave birth to the world wide web, that useful bit of technology that has made Big Brother a potentially very exciting marketing tool –weapon if you like. With a little retrospective irony, in 1984, Steve Jobs and his agency Chiat Day used Ridley Scott to make the ad to launch the Apple Mac based on Big Brother, without knowing that its potential would only be fully realized by access to Big Brother aka the interweb aka Google.

Personally, I’m all for it. All sorts of people who know nothing about me try to sell me stuff, which if they did know me, they would appreciate are highly unlikely to interest me. Why not let people who do know something about me sell me stuff I might actually like, on useful occasions. I would only want to add one teency weency caveat – Permission. I’d like to be able to choose what information they use to form their judgment about me and be selective as to who uses it and when they can use it. It’s not much to ask in return for a good deal of co-operation on my part. And I have a very good record of co-operation with vendors and marketers, as do most of us. Over the years I have told my bank about every aspect of my life, my family, my ambitions, which has helped them sell me all manner of financial products. I often find myself telling some shop assistant more than they seem to want to know in order to help them recommend the best camera or phone. I rarely refuse to answer any relevant question. In fact I spend more time getting frustrated that companies don’t use information about me that they either have or could easily get than I do worrying about what they might be doing with information I didn’t know they had.

Orwell intended the name Big Brother for the dictator who used all the surveillance information to be sinister precisely because we are meant to trust our big brothers. And trust is the issue. We don’t mind giving information if we trust the person and how they will use it, especially if we trust them to use it to our advantage. Despite all the recent problems I still trust my bank and in particular the person with whom I deal. I can think of many brands, and the organizations behind those brands, with whom I’d be delighted to share information and give permission to use it, because I trust them. Fine in the analogue world where the trust has been built over years and/or where you have a real person to deal with who can explain what they need to know and why they need to know it. Not so easy in digital. You may not know this brand or business, you don’t know what information they have or can get, there is no one to talk to. On the contrary there are too many examples of companies you have never heard of or dealt with, using information you did not know they had to market you stuff you don’t want, and no-one to complain to (yes I know you can report Spam but it’s not the same thing).

Trust can be earned but it takes time, consistency and proof – like the offer of advice that is clearly in your interests and not that of the brand or company (my bank manager once suggested a rival bank’s mortgage because at the time it was better, you can imagine what that did for our relationship). Doctors – good ones – don’t just run tests on you, they explain what the test is for and check you are happy for them to do it. I don’t see the point in secretly amassing all this information and using the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes to make use of it for covert marketing ends. Just ask me, brother. Take a little time to build a relationship and trust. Tell me what information you need and why it will help you to help me. Show me what information you have and allow me to correct or edit some of it if I have concerns. Give me someone I can talk to or at least write to – give me a human face. Be polite and ask my permission – regularly. Work hard to show me that you are using what you know to help and reward me. You will be surprised what I might be prepared to share and what permission I might be willing to give if I thought you really were like my big brother.

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Posted: August 1st, 2011 | Author: stuart.treasure | Filed under: Customer Champions | Tags: , , , | Leave a Comment »

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