Frequency or Permission? Opening up your Marketing Strategy.

Our brilliant media planner, Waheeda Majid Aziz, and I have two different approaches to winning attention.

Waheeda is right when she says that  success in advertising is without a doubt, frequency. Repeat your message all the time, buy enough ads via the obvious channels, state your message over and over again and you’ll probably get the desired outcomes you’re seeking.

There is one caveat.

The Net.

If you repeat your message over and over again. People get weary. They tune out. They click on the next interesting thing. In the online world, smart people are bored with frequency and they won’t sit still for repetitive messages. 

There’s is another strategy to try. Win the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to the folks who want to get them. Seth Goodin calls it Permission Marketing.  

Of course it requires that you think differently. If the same messages time after time bores, the challenge really is to do something that embraces the audience. Give them  what they want: interesting, new content, instead of what you need (frequency). Even better, get their consent to receive this content and if interesting enough, they’ll  spread it across their own networks. You can’t pay for that kind of authencity. 

I know it’s a new way to think. It’s not that Waheeda is wrong and I am right, or vice-versa. But I do think that there are now different approaches to getting  your products/ services  to move off the shelves  and we’ve got to open our marketing strategies to them.