Greater>Than Clothing

I have a lot to learn if I’m going to bring a company into existence. My plan is twofold: A) Read lots of books. B) Maintain a grateful attitude towards anyone who is willing to teach me something. If you can think of a book that a new entrepreneur should read, please leave suggestions in the comments or e-mail joey [at] greaterthanclothing.

Seth Godin has long been considered an authority on marketing in the internet age. He founded a pioneering online marketing company and sold it to Yahoo! before writing Permission Marketing in 1999. That makes this book fairly ancient by internet standards, and it does show its age at times (he gushes about My Yahoo!, which isn’t exactly groundbreaking any more), but I was actually surprised at how relevant the message still is. There certainly are companies that have yet to adjust their marketing to take advantage of the opportunity represented by the revolutionary change in the nature of communication (or, more fundamentally, information) over the last decade.

Godin starts by describing the late 20th century’s dominant paradigm, which he dubs “Interruption Marketing”. He’s referring to the mass broadcast commercial, junk mail, spam, and all other forms of marketing that are a mile wide and an inch deep. Response rates for this type of message are very low, but with enough resources it has been possible to make up for that with volume. He makes a great point about how traditional media and Interruption Marketing are mutually reinforcing. They can’t exist without each other.

As programming choices multiplied and new media started vying for the consumer’s time, attention became a scarce commodity, which put new constraints on the efficacy of Interruption Marketing. I’d argue that the fragmentation of the entertainment landscape has only accelerated since 1999 (this was before YouTube, before blog readership gained any momentum, etc.). The internet, part of the “problem” for traditional marketers, provided tools that made another form of marketing, “Permission Marketing”, much easier to scale.

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