Push and Pull Marketing

Video Transcription

Hello and welcome to this tutorial on push and pull marketing. Now, as always with these tutorials, please feel free to fast forward, pause, or rewind as many times as you need in order to get the most out of the time that you're going to spend here. Well, normally at this time I would ask you a question, but right now before we do that I want to quote a movie line. You're going to say, movie line? Well, the movie line is from a movie called The Godfather. And the line is, "you keep your friends close, but your enemies closer."

You want to pull those people in. You want to make sure you're keeping tabs on your friends-- in a business' case they're customers-- but you're also keeping tabs on your competitors too. It's an example of pulling people closer to you.

Well, what are we going to talk about in this lesson? Well, we're going to talk about push or pushing things out. We're going to talk about how to pull my friends closer to me. And we'll talk about which one to use, also the four C's of social technology that a business needs to watch out for.

Now the key terms for this lesson are going to be "push marketing" and "pull marketing." So let's get started with defining what push marketing is. Well, push marketing is using anticipated demand. An organization pushes information about itself or its product to a potential customer.

Now examples of this might be emailing a coupon. You're pushing information to a customer. Trade shows or direct selling, how a package is designed, for instance, can be a form of push marketing. Or point of purchase displays, you're pushing information, you're pushing information, you're pushing information on to a customer.

Another example of this is something called interruption marketing. Interruption marketing, telemarketing falls into this. I am interrupting you in something that you are doing to tell you about something. It's not passive anymore. I am actively involved in pushing my message to you, the customer. There's pluses and minuses of this. One, it can be annoying to get spam mail or phone calls about something. But you know what, it works. If it didn't work people wouldn't do it. So this can be an effective form of marketing, depending on what it is you're trying to do.

Now pull marketing is exactly the opposite. We're using actual numbers about demand. The organization develops methods to bring the market to them. So we're researching, we're doing our analysis, and we're seeing with the demand for a particular product is. Then we're using advertising to pull customers into me. We want to convince them to come to my place, but we're not pushing information necessarily, or interrupting them in their daily routine.

Examples of this would be traditional advertising, or maybe referrals or sales promotions. These are things that are passive in nature. Being on popular networks, the Food Network or CNN or name another television network. Being on those popular networks with a particular demographic. MTV would be a great way to pull people in to generate interest about my particular product. A classic example of pull marketing is if I can get people to actually call me. Once they call me or they email me then I pull that customer into my marketing plan.

So which one do I use? There's benefits and drawbacks to each one of these. Well, to be successful a lot of companies use elements of both. And you can see in certain things like display ads at point of purchase, they can be a gray area between push and pull. Is it really pushing product to me or is it simply advising me and trying to get me to pull in to that particular product?

Now if you're starting a new business or you're launching a new product you don't have a lot of customer awareness out there. So in this case, you know what, push marketing is going to be a really good option for you. Because you have to push information to the consumer.

You have to get it in front of them, and you have to make the customer aware that your product is out there. If you don't do this actively, then no one's going to know about your product. And if they don't know about your product then they're not going to buy it.

An example of this when the retail stores is pushing or persuading outlets or retailers to purchase and stock your product and pushing it promotionally, but I'm pushing it to businesses who are also going to be my customers. Because if they can sell it to the end user, then they're going to buy more from me. And raising brand awareness by building word of mouth. Getting free samples out there, stopping on the street corner, hey, would you like to try this particular product? That's a way to spread word of mouth about how good your product is. And it's an example of push marketing.

Now building a product around a consumer, having at target audience in mind as you're making the product can help you with pulling the customer in. So now I have a new product, but I built it around a particular customer. I've considered all those elements of the marketing mix and I have this great new product that works for a particular group. It really does work for this particular demand. So now I can use both methods and not rely on simply one or the other to make my business successful.

Now 4 C's. The 4 C's we've talked about before, but this one is going to be just a little bit different. Here we're talking about the four C's of social technology. What are those levels of cooperation or involvement when I want my customers to be involved with my company?

Well, the first one is consumption. If I'm marketing something on a social media or social technology I want to first get the consumer to consume my information. They have to be able to see it or read it. And this can be accomplished through pop up ads, or this can be accomplished through word of mouth on a social network or things like that.

Now the next level is something called curation. And here what we're doing is we're getting the customer, or the customer is now collecting data and they're saving data about it. They may put my website as one of their favorites and they might visit it or return to it more often. They also might save coupons or download or print things about my particular business. Here they're saving information about it. So now they're going beyond simply consuming it, and they're going to that next level where they're saving information and product promotion about my product.

Next is creation. I'm creating a buzz. Now hey, you know what, I'm creating referrals or word of mouth about a particular product on the internet using social media. Did you hear about what company A did? Or did you hear about this great new product?

And lastly, I really want to get them to this phase, and this is collaboration. You can think about it as being a part of my virtual community. Not only are they creating things about me, creating word of mouth advertising, but they're working collaboratively with me. I am now part of their group, and we are working together, we are collaborating on my marketing strategy. And in doing so, I'm gaining repeat customers, because these are people who are now part of my, quote, unquote, "family."

And they're helping drive my sales and my marketing by being collaborative in their efforts with me. Pretty neat, huh. But you know what? It's also really hard to do. But like anything else that's hard, if it wasn't hard it wouldn't be worth doing.

So what did we talk about during this lesson? Well, we looked at push marketing. What that is, pushing information out to a consumer about a product, casting that wide net. Pulling consumers in, or looking at the actual demand or that target market and creating a marketing strategy, that instead of pushing and interrupting people, actually pulls customers to my business or product.

We also looked at which to use, and found out that, you know what, using them both together really does work well. And lastly, we looked at those four C's of social technology, those four levels of social technology as far as customers are concerned-- consumption, curation, creation, and collaboration.

Now as always, I want to thank you for spending some time with me today. I hope you had a good time, I know I did. I'll see you guys next time.