In a conversation with our friend Ashwin Ramasamy the other week, he brought up a term we hadn’t heard in awhile: Permission marketing.
Coined and popularized by Seth Godin right before the dawn of the Web 2.0, Godin defined “permission marketing” as “the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.”
Read his book—or even that quote—and it’s eerie how accurately Godin nailed (in 1999) the path down which marketing was headed.
Over the years, Godin has checked in on this term.
In 2013:
“The biggest misfire from my original book, the thing I didn't understand well enough, is how nuanced the pursuit of permission would become… Over and over, marketers that have touched this asset have raced to push it too hard and too fast, and along the way, lost the very permission they worked so hard to get.”
Here we are, 8 years after Godin’s last check-in, and Ashwin goes and drops this during our conversation:
“Ask the customer’s permission and earn their trust and make the fulfillment process and checkout process friction-free and seamless … and that’s a better way to earn trust than by kind of using dark patterns to retain the customer on a subscription flywheel. Is that the idea?”
While we wouldn’t go so far as to call subscriptions dark patterns, the comment really got us, especially since Godin has previously talked about subscriptions through the lens of permission marketing.
Godin, again, this time in 2008: “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 ones.”
So: How’d we get here? How’d we get to subscriptions being used in the same sentence as dark patterns?
The answer, it seems, lies in that 2013 insight from Godin: “Marketers that have touched this asset have raced to push it too hard and too fast.”
While healthy subscription businesses have been the brass rings of CPG brands selling DTC, subscription is, simultaneously, a flawed solution to retention. We explored this idea in our proposal of a new phrase (re-acquisition) last month, but, critically, that flaw is spotted more readily in the permission process a consumer and a brand go through.
Consider: When a customer agrees to a subscription (be it a service, like a newspaper, or a product, like toothpaste) they do so with the expectation that there’s been consideration given to the frequency with which the subscription is delivered.
With CPG subscriptions, though, brands have largely offloaded that consideration to their customers.
While that seems fine on its face, it’s problematic in that customers are rarely asked to make that decision for any subscription service. With that dynamic in play, a product subscription leaves a brand vulnerable to pushing “too hard and too fast” and losing the permission altogether.
This risk is, perhaps, best summed up by something Sarah Foley of Swat Equity said to us recently: “The best way to lose a customer is to let your product pile up in their house.”
The way to ensure keeping permission, it seems, is for brands to absorb the responsibility of making better, more informed considerations around frequency—and helping a customer understand what that means for them.