What are Push and Pull Strategies for Amazing Success?

All the companies (B2C & B2B) engage in a range of strategies to get their messages & products across to the customers. One of the many ways to categorize these strategies is Push & Pull or Outbound & Inbound Strategies.

Simply put, push means pushing your product to the customer whereas pull means pulling the customer to your product. Push mostly happens via sales channels by giving incentives to the sellers whereas pull mostly happens by attracting the customers through heavy advertising. In pull consumers actively seek out the brand/product because of high top of the mind recall value and reputation. E.g. Apple iPhones doesn’t need to push the product to the customers. It’s always pull on apple products. Push gives quick results in terms of sales whereas pull is slow but establishes strong brand recognition in the market.

Examples of Push Marketing:

-        -> Face to Face Sales in showrooms

-        -> Point of Sales Promotion to attract the customer for purchase

-        -> Trade show promotion

-        ->  Offering free rides, free samples, free demos

-        -> Cold emails with call to action buttons offering heavy discounts etc

-        -> Affiliate Marketing  

Examples of Pull Marketing:

-        -> Advertising & mass media promotions

-        -> Word of mouth referrals

-        -> Social Media Marketing

-        -> Search Engine Optimization

Like any other marketing strategy – Push & Pull also require planning and consideration of the audience and marketplace. Each tactic must be monitored, reviewed and revised on regular basis. To decide which method best fits your business, think about how you want to approach consumers and what is your objective. If your objective is to quickly clear the inventories or improve the sales – push is the way; if you want to build brand and are ready to wait for the customers to become aware of your brand and come to the point of sales asking for your product – pull is the way. Mostly pull is best fit for the products which sale around the year whereas push the best fit for seasonal products like products related to rains. It’s just because of the slow nature of the pull and the seasons are short.  

You can even use push and pull together. In fact, most companies apply a balance of both the strategies. They advertise heavily talking about the benefits of their products and give incentives to the distributors or retailers (including discounts or even credit) for buying more in expectation of high sales due to massive advertising in print and multi-media.

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