Push Vs. Pull Marketing And Why You Need Both

We can define pull and push marketing from the perspective of the target audience or customers. In push marketing, as the name suggests, you’re promoting a product so that consumers can see it. In a pull strategy, consumers might look for your product or service drawn by its brand.

Push marketing in a nutshell

Push marketing in the retail world stands for tactics aiming to bring products to customers.

This means a focus on enhancing the visibility of your offering so that consumers can decide to purchase it more easily.

For instance, in the manufacturing world, this might mean a better display on a shelf.

The critical element of a push strategy, therefore, is the product’s ability to reach consumers.

Examples of Push Marketing

In a way, push marketing generates demand with a top-down approach. The customer is not looking for your brand or your product.

Instead, you’re pushing it through them. This might imply a set of tactics that are interruptive in nature.

Things like a mass media campaign or an advertising campaign on social media, or any other tactic that makes the consumers see your brand while they’re doing something else.

Other examples of push campaigns where you get your message to consumers in an interruptive way are:

Direct selling.
Face to face.
Sales canvassing.
Point of sales displays.
Social media marketing.

Pull marketing in a nutshell

Pull main marketing aim is to have consumers see you when they are already looking for something similar to the product or service you offer.

Or they are looking for your brand.

The primary objective is to create loyalty toward a brand so those same people will get back without you having to push your product or service to them with interruptive strategies.

Examples of Pull Marketing

In a way, pull marketing generates demand at a bottom-up level.

Indeed, in a push marketing strategy, a brand interrupts a consumer by delivering a message independently from the consumer looking for it.

Pull marketing shows the product or brand when consumers are seeking it.

The advantage of a pull campaign is that consumers might recognize your brand and therefore ask for it.

This also helps the company build a better distribution strategy.

A pull marketing campaign might require substantial investments, yet it might be more cost-effective in the long run compared to push marketing as it might imply better loyalty and conversion.

Push and Pull marketing and why they both matter in the digital era

With digitalization, the difference between push and pull has become less important.

Indeed, what was defined as rules in the past have become blurred now.

For instance, when in the past, a company needed to spend millions in mass media campaigns to push their product to consumers just to build brand loyalty.

Nowadays, with targeted ads or with organic campaigns via search engines, it’s possible to reach a large number of people that are actually seeking a product or service.

Both push and pull strategies seek to generate demand.

Sometimes, a push strategy might be hard to distinguish from a pull strategy.

For instance, when Google closed the deal with AOL in its early years, that meant a short-term boost and a strong push strategy.

However, the association of the Google brand with AOL (at the time among the most recognized web companies) also created brand recognition.

This, in a way, is the B2B2C business model strategy in action.

This difference is harder in practice.

Brand and conversion are tied in the real world.

A more recognized brand might imply better conversion. Therefore, tapping into both push and pull is critical for any organization!

Push vs. pull marketing examples

To solidify the concept of push and pull marketing, let’s look at an example of each.

Push marketing

Spam

Have you ever wondered why spam is the term we use for unwanted emails that are sent en masse?

The name originates from a canned meat product created by the Hormel Foods Corporation in 1937.

The company, which claims there are 12.8 cans of SPAM eaten around the world every second, has used push marketing to promote itself over many decades.

Hormel created a buzz around SPAM’s launch by holding a public naming contest with a cash prize of $100.

To emphasize the versatility of canned meat, Hormel then created a recipe book based on fan submissions with over 50 different ways to incorporate the food into meals.

This versatility was again highlighted during the Second World War, with soldiers using grease from the cans to waterproof their boots and lubricate their weapons. Those stationed overseas also introduced the product to locals, which broadened its appeal.

In the boom years after the war had ended, the company employed a musical troupe of veterans known as the Hormel Girls.

The troupe would travel the United States performing songs that promoted the product and were even featured on three national radio networks.

Today, SPAM is as American as apple pie. Hormel positioned the brand as a patriotic food that reflected America’s ingenuity and versatility.

It also recognized that push marketing needed to complement its product which was simple, cheap, and not particularly exciting.

In more recent years, Hormel has added to the brand experience with the Spamarama cooking festival which ran for 41 years.

Other promotional efforts include a SPAM-sponsored NASCAR vehicle and a Broadway music entitled Spamalot.

Pull marketing

Ferrari

Ferrari, like all luxury brands, employs pull marketing to draw consumers to its range of premium products.

The company could certainly sell cheaper vehicles and make millions in the process, but it attracts consumers to the brand by maintaining exclusivity and only producing top-end sports cars.

Ferrari started as a racing stable that entered amateur drivers into various races driving Alfa Romeos.

While the company continued as a racing stable for almost twenty years, Ferrari was forced to manufacture and sell a vehicle that could be driven on public roads to continue to fund his passion.

In 1947, Ferrari sold just two vehicles, with this culture of restricting the number of vehicles sold existing in some form today.

This culture was referenced by current CEO Louis Camilleri, who believes that the company’s long wait period for a new car – which often exceeds twelve months – is a key indicator of the brand’s value, exclusivity, and ability to pull in customers.

The company further enhances its pull marketing strategy by refusing to sell vehicles to certain individuals – even if they have the money to purchase.

Ferrari only deals with customers that fit a certain profile and, in most cases, the customer must provide evidence that they’ve owned one of its cars in the past.

There is also the Ferrari Owners Club, consisting of current or previous owners who receive exclusive access to new model launches and other events.

All these initiatives increase brand appeal and create significant pricing power for the company across new and used models.

Why do push and pull need to walk hand in hand?!

In theory, we all like to think of ourselves as able only to build a business based on a pull strategy.

And while this might be true for some, for many others, a combination of push and pull it’s critical.

This is true, especially for companies that are starting up from scratch.

In that case, you need to look into ways to build the business in the short-term while also building a pull strategy in the longer term.

Let’s take the case of a software company starting from scratch with no clients.

How do you kick things off?

Of course, you might start leveraging things like blogging, providing free tools to users, newsletters, and more.

Yet, as you start, you don’t have any traction on these channels.

You must go out in the world and make sure people get to know you.

Thus, you start using, for instance, a paid strategy to drive some traffic back to your product landing pages.

While at the same time, you have a salesperson doing outreach to qualified prospects.

And in the meantime you built valuable content on your blog.

As you push to bring in the first customers, you can use some of these resources to build a valuable pull funnel, where people get to you from search engines or because they heard about you on social media.

In that way, you can start building a loyal audience made of customers, users, and more.

With a combination of push and pull, you can speed up the growth process, especially in the very early days.

The resources you need to get started with your business model:

Popular case studies from the blog:

Visual Marketing Glossary

Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy where the marketing and sales departments come together to create personalized buying experiences for high-value accounts. Account-based marketing is a business-to-business (B2B) approach in which marketing and sales teams work together to target high-value accounts and turn them into customers.

Ad-Ops

Ad Ops – also known as Digital Ad Operations – refers to systems and processes that support digital advertisements’ delivery and management. The concept describes any process that helps a marketing team manage, run, or optimize ad campaigns, making them an integrating part of the business operations.

AARRR Funnel

Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.

Affinity Marketing

Affinity marketing involves a partnership between two or more businesses to sell more products. Note that this is a mutually beneficial arrangement where one brand can extend its reach and enhance its credibility in association with the other.

Ambush Marketing

As the name suggests, ambush marketing raises awareness for brands at events in a covert and unexpected fashion. Ambush marketing takes many forms, one common element, the brand advertising their products or services has not paid for the right to do so. Thus, the business doing the ambushing attempts to capitalize on the efforts made by the business sponsoring the event.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing describes the process whereby an affiliate earns a commission for selling the products of another person or company. Here, the affiliate is simply an individual who is motivated to promote a particular product through incentivization. The business whose product is being promoted will gain in terms of sales and marketing from affiliates.

Bullseye Framework

The bullseye framework is a simple method that enables you to prioritize the marketing channels that will make your company gain traction. The main logic of the bullseye framework is to find the marketing channels that work and prioritize them.

Brand Building

Brand building is the set of activities that help companies to build an identity that can be recognized by its audience. Thus, it works as a mechanism of identification through core values that signal trust and that help build long-term relationships between the brand and its key stakeholders.

Brand Dilution

According to inbound marketing platform HubSpot, brand dilution occurs “when a company’s brand equity diminishes due to an unsuccessful brand extension, which is a new product the company develops in an industry that they don’t have any market share in.” Brand dilution, therefore, occurs when a brand decreases in value after the company releases a product that does not align with its vision, mission, or skillset.

Brand Essence Wheel

The brand essence wheel is a templated approach businesses can use to better understand their brand. The brand essence wheel has obvious implications for external brand strategy. However, it is equally important in simplifying brand strategy for employees without a strong marketing background. Although many variations of the brand essence wheel exist, a comprehensive wheel incorporates information from five categories: attributes, benefits, values, personality, brand essence.

Brand Equity

The brand equity is the premium that a customer is willing to pay for a product that has all the objective characteristics of existing alternatives, thus, making it different in terms of perception. The premium on seemingly equal products and quality is attributable to its brand equity.

Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is about creating a mental real estate in the mind of the target market. If successful, brand positioning allows a business to gain a competitive advantage. And it also works as a switching cost in favor of the brand. Consumers recognizing a brand might be less prone to switch to another brand.

Business Storytelling

Business storytelling is a critical part of developing a business model. Indeed, the way you frame the story of your organization will influence its brand in the long-term. That’s because your brand story is tied to your brand identity, and it enables people to identify with a company.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.

Customer Lifetime Value

One of the first mentions of customer lifetime value was in the 1988 book Database Marketing: Strategy and Implementation written by Robert Shaw and Merlin Stone. Customer lifetime value (CLV) represents the value of a customer to a company over a period of time. It represents a critical business metric, especially for SaaS or recurring revenue-based businesses.

Customer Segmentation

Customer segmentation is a marketing method that divides the customers in sub-groups, that share similar characteristics. Thus, product, marketing and engineering teams can center the strategy from go-to-market to product development and communication around each sub-group. Customer segments can be broken down is several ways, such as demographics, geography, psychographics and more.

Developer Marketing

Developer marketing encompasses tactics designed to grow awareness and adopt software tools, solutions, and SaaS platforms. Developer marketing has become the standard among software companies with a platform component, where developers can build applications on top of the core software or open software. Therefore, engaging developer communities has become a key element of marketing for many digital businesses.

Digital Marketing Channels

A digital channel is a marketing channel, part of a distribution strategy, helping an organization to reach its potential customers via electronic means. There are several digital marketing channels, usually divided into organic and paid channels. Some organic channels are SEO, SMO, email marketing. And some paid channels comprise SEM, SMM, and display advertising.

Field Marketing

Field marketing is a general term that encompasses face-to-face marketing activities carried out in the field. These activities may include street promotions, conferences, sales, and various forms of experiential marketing. Field marketing, therefore, refers to any marketing activity that is performed in the field.

Funnel Marketing

interaction with a brand until they become a paid customer and beyond. Funnel marketing is modeled after the marketing funnel, a concept that tells the company how it should market to consumers based on their position in the funnel itself. The notion of a customer embarking on a journey when interacting with a brand was first proposed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898. Funnel marketing typically considers three stages of a non-linear marketing funnel. These are top of the funnel (TOFU), middle of the funnel (MOFU), and bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Particular marketing strategies at each stage are adapted to the level of familiarity the consumer has with a brand.

Go-To-Market Strategy

A go-to-market strategy represents how companies market their new products to reach target customers in a scalable and repeatable way. It starts with how new products/services get developed to how these organizations target potential customers (via sales and marketing models) to enable their value proposition to be delivered to create a competitive advantage.

Greenwashing

The term “greenwashing” was first coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986 at a time when most consumers received their news from television, radio, and print media. Some companies took advantage of limited public access to information by portraying themselves as environmental stewards – even when their actions proved otherwise. Greenwashing is a deceptive marketing practice where a company makes unsubstantiated claims about an environmentally-friendly product or service.

Grassroots Marketing

Grassroots marketing involves a brand creating highly targeted content for a particular niche or audience. When an organization engages in grassroots marketing, it focuses on a small group of people with the hope that its marketing message is shared with a progressively larger audience.

Growth Marketing

Growth marketing is a process of rapid experimentation, which in a way has to be “scientific” by keeping in mind that it is used by startups to grow, quickly. Thus, the “scientific” here is not meant in the academic sense. Growth marketing is expected to unlock growth, quickly and with an often limited budget.

Guerrilla Marketing

Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that seeks to utilize low-cost and sometimes unconventional tactics that are high impact. First coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book of the same title, guerrilla marketing works best on existing customers who are familiar with a brand or product and its particular characteristics.

Hunger Marketing

Hunger marketing is a marketing strategy focused on manipulating consumer emotions. By bringing products to market with an attractive price point and restricted supply, consumers have a stronger desire to make a purchase.

Integrated Communication

Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is an approach used by businesses to coordinate and brand their communication strategies. Integrated marketing communication takes separate marketing functions and combines them into one, interconnected approach with a core brand message that is consistent across various channels. These encompass owned, earned, and paid media. Integrated marketing communication has been used to great effect by companies such as Snapchat, Snickers, and Domino’s.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy designed to attract customers to a brand with content and experiences that they derive value from. Inbound marketing utilizes blogs, events, SEO, and social media to create brand awareness and attract targeted consumers. By attracting or “drawing in” a targeted audience, inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing which actively pushes a brand onto consumers who may have no interest in what is being offered.

Integrated Marketing

Integrated marketing describes the process of delivering consistent and relevant content to a target audience across all marketing channels. It is a cohesive, unified, and immersive marketing strategy that is cost-effective and relies on brand identity and storytelling to amplify the brand to a wider and wider audience.

Marketing Mix

The marketing mix is a term to describe the multi-faceted approach to a complete and effective marketing plan. Traditionally, this plan included the four Ps of marketing: price, product, promotion, and place. But the exact makeup of a marketing mix has undergone various changes in response to new technologies and ways of thinking. Additions to the four Ps include physical evidence, people, process, and even politics.

Marketing Myopia

Marketing myopia is the nearsighted focus on selling goods and services at the expense of consumer needs. Marketing myopia was coined by Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt in 1960. Originally, Levitt described the concept in the context of organizations in high-growth industries that become complacent in their belief that such industries never fail.

Marketing Personas

Marketing personas give businesses a general overview of key segments of their target audience and how these segments interact with their brand. Marketing personas are based on the data of an ideal, fictional customer whose characteristics, needs, and motivations are representative of a broader market segment.

Meme Marketing

Meme marketing is any marketing strategy that uses memes to promote a brand. The term “meme” itself was popularized by author Richard Dawkins over 50 years later in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In the book, Dawkins described how ideas evolved and were shared across different cultures. The internet has enabled this exchange to occur at an exponential rate, with the first modern memes emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Microtargeting

Microtargeting is a marketing strategy that utilizes consumer demographic data to identify the interests of a very specific group of individuals. Like most marketing strategies, the goal of microtargeting is to positively influence consumer behavior.

Multi-Channel Marketing

Multichannel marketing executes a marketing strategy across multiple platforms to reach as many consumers as possible. Here, a platform may refer to product packaging, word-of-mouth advertising, mobile apps, email, websites, or promotional events, and all the other channels that can help amplify the brand to reach as many consumers as possible.

Multi-Level Marketing

Multi-level marketing (MLM), otherwise known as network or referral marketing, is a strategy in which businesses sell their products through person-to-person sales. When consumers join MLM programs, they act as distributors. Distributors make money by selling the product directly to other consumers. They earn a small percentage of sales from those that they recruit to do the same – often referred to as their “downline”.

Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of the ability of a product or service to attract word-of-mouth advertising. NPS is a crucial part of any marketing strategy since attracting and then retaining customers means they are more likely to recommend a business to others.

Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing information is collected by measuring brain activity related to specific brain functions using sophisticated and expensive technology such as MRI machines. Some businesses also choose to make inferences of neurological responses by analyzing biometric and heart-rate data. Neuromarketing is the domain of large companies with similarly large budgets or subsidies. These include Frito-Lay, Google, and The Weather Channel.

Newsjacking

Newsjacking as a marketing strategy was popularised by David Meerman Scott in his book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage. Newsjacking describes the practice of aligning a brand with a current event to generate media attention and increase brand exposure.

Niche Marketing

A microniche is a subset of potential customers within a niche. In the era of dominating digital super-platforms, identifying a microniche can kick off the strategy of digital businesses to prevent competition against large platforms. As the microniche becomes a niche, then a market, scale becomes an option.

Push vs. Pull Marketing

Real-Time Marketing

Real-time marketing is as exactly as it sounds. It involves in-the-moment marketing to customers across any channel based on how that customer is interacting with the brand.

Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing involves businesses and their brands forming long-term relationships with customers. The focus of relationship marketing is to increase customer loyalty and engagement through high-quality products and services. It differs from short-term processes focused solely on customer acquisition and individual sales.

Reverse Marketing

Reverse marketing describes any marketing strategy that encourages consumers to seek out a product or company on their own. This approach differs from a traditional marketing strategy where marketers seek out the consumer.

Remarketing

Remarketing involves the creation of personalized and targeted ads for consumers who have already visited a company’s website. The process works in this way: as users visit a brand’s website, they are tagged with cookies that follow the users, and as they land on advertising platforms where retargeting is an option (like social media platforms) they get served ads based on their navigation.

Sensory Marketing

Sensory marketing describes any marketing campaign designed to appeal to the five human senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are enabling marketers to design fun, interactive, and immersive sensory marketing brand experiences. Long term, businesses must develop sensory marketing campaigns that are relevant and effective in eCommerce.

Services Marketing

Services marketing originated as a separate field of study during the 1980s. Researchers realized that the unique characteristics of services required different marketing strategies to those used in the promotion of physical goods. Services marketing is a specialized branch of marketing that promotes the intangible benefits delivered by a company to create customer value.

Sustainable Marketing

Sustainable marketing describes how a business will invest in social and environmental initiatives as part of its marketing strategy. Also known as green marketing, it is often used to counteract public criticism around wastage, misleading advertising, and poor quality or unsafe products.

Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing strategy skewed toward offering a great experience to existing customers and incentivizing them to share it with other potential customers. That is one of the most effective forms of marketing as it enables a company to gain traction based on existing customers’ referrals. When repeat customers become a key enabler for the brand this is one of the best organic and sustainable growth marketing strategies.

360 Marketing

360 marketing is a marketing campaign that utilizes all available mediums, channels, and consumer touchpoints. 360 marketing requires the business to maintain a consistent presence across multiple online and offline channels. This ensures it does not miss potentially lucrative customer segments. By its very nature, 360 marketing describes any number of different marketing strategies. However, a broad and holistic marketing strategy should incorporate a website, SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media, public relations, in-store relations, and traditional forms of advertising such as television.

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