The Pros & Cons of Push And Pull MarketingSometimes you sell by pushing your products to potential customers. Sometimes you sell by pulling potential customers back to you.By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)What Is Marketing?At its core, marketing is the use of a collection of tools to get people to buy your stuff.Push MarketingTraditionally, most marketing is “push” marketing, that is the seller uses some mechanism, some medium, to shout at a collection of people:“I have wonderful widgets at a great price” in the hope that some of them will make a purchase.Pull MarketingBut there is another type of marketing — “pull” marketing, where people who have already decided to buy a particular product are drawn to the seller and say, “I’m interested in buying a new widget. What kind of a deal can you offer me?”How Push Marketing WorksIn push marketing, the people who hear your “I have great widgets” message fall into several groups:People who don’t buy widgets and never willPeople who might buy widgets some day but are not interested in buying a widget in the near futurePeople who previously weren’t thinking of buying a widget, but after hearing your message might consider buying one now.People who were already planning on buying a widget.To a material degree, the money spent delivering your message tothe permanent non-widget buyers, andthe people who are not currently in the market for a widgetis wasted.Sending Your Message Only To Potential CustomersIn a perfect world you would primarily send your message to those people who are definitely planning on buying a widget or who might be enticed into buying a widget.If you could arrange things so that only those two groups heard your message you could spend a fraction of your current marketing time and money and still get the same sales volume.But that’s difficult to do. The smaller the percentage of the population that are potential customers for your product, the more targeted the medium delivering your message needs to be.If you’re selling toilet paper, over 90% of the people who see your commercial on network TV are potential customers.If you’re selling table saws over 90% of the people who see your commercial on network TV are not potential customers, and the money you spend on sending your message to them will largely be wasted.Let’s imagine a huge bazaar full of seller’s stalls. Crowds amble down the aisles while vendors shout: “Look at my beautiful silk scarves”; “Best quality knives”; “I have the finest spices”; and so on.Only a small percentage of the people who pass any particular booth will be potential customers for that seller’s products.Wasting your message on people who will never buy your product is the fundamental problem with mass-market, push marketing.How Pull Marketing WorksLet’s divide the bazaar into specialty sections where all the clothing merchants are on one aisle, furniture makers on another, jewelry sellers on a third, and so forth.Now the crowds thronging the jewelry aisle have self-selected themselves into people who are interested in buying jewelry. People who had no interest in buying jewelry will be in some other aisle or not in the bazaar at all.The operators of the bazaar have implemented a strategy that has pulled the jewelry buyers out of the general population of shoppers and sent them to the jewelry sellers.This happened because the jewelry sellers spent part of their marketing budget setting up the bazaar and telling people, “Come to our bazaar. We have whatever you want — spices, jewelry, clothing, food, tools, furniture. Come to the bazaar!”Pull marketing doesn’t concentrate as much on selling a particular product as it does on luring existing customers for that product into contact with the seller. It’s then up to the seller to use its remaining marketing budget to distinguish its product from its competitors and to offer incentives to customers to buy it.Pull Marketing Doesn’t Add New CustomersThe problem with pull marketing is that it cannot convince those people who weren’t thinking about buying a widget or who didn’t even know that widgets existed that buying a widget would be a good idea.In push marketing, using a mass-market medium to sell a non-mass-market product is inefficient, but a mass-market message can reach potential new buyers who weren’t already in the market for your product or who never even knew that your product existed.In pull marketing, your marketing spending is highly efficient in closing transactions with already-interested buyers, but it is unable to attract new customers who weren’t already in the market for your product or who never even knew that your product existed.Using Both Push & Pull Marketing ToolsAn optimal strategy might be to use your push-marketing dollars to try to convince people who are not currently customers for your type of product that owning a product like yours would make their lives better while using your pull-marketing spending to, first, lure existing customers to your door and second, to close sales with those interested buyers who do show up.Pull Marketing In The Digital WorldIn one sense, Amazon is a foray into pull marketing. People who already know what they want to buy, a new printer, a set of cutlery, a pair of running shoes, come to Amazon to search the available offerings in that product category. They’re like the people who go to the bazaar’s jewelry aisle because they’re already thinking about buying a new piece of jewelry.Today, sellers primarily see Amazon as a distribution channel rather than as a pull-marketing medium. Partially that’s because Amazon sees itself more as a distributor rather than as a marketing medium.An Amazon Clone More Focused On Acting As A Pull Marketing MediumSuppose we created an Amazon clone that operated somewhat differently. Let’s call it Columbia.Columbia actively pulls in shoppers byPaying them to shop thereBetter product searchBetter product informationBetter promotion of new productsAutomatic Rebates For Shopping On ColumbiaSellers on Columbia would be selling directly to end-users instead of to a distributor at a wholesale price 40% to 50% less than the retail price. This direct-sale channel approach would allow sellers to pay buyers a 5% — 10% cash rebate on all purchases via a credit to the purchaser’s Columbia account.That means that if you spent $1,000 on Columbia last month, you’d find a $100 credit in your Columbia account this month.Suppose the normal retail price on a certain Nikon camera was $1,000. Nikon normally sells that camera to re-sellers for $600. If Columbia charges a $120 sales commission and if the rebate is $80 and because Nikon still needs to get its same $600 then we will have an $800 sale price before rebate.If Nikon charges $15 for shipping then the total to the customer after shipping and before sales tax would be $735 ($800+$15 — $80). Nikon would get $615 and Columbia would get $120.The final price would show as:$800.00 Merchandise price- $ 80.00 (10% Discount/rebate)$720.00 Price after discount+$ 15.00 Shipping (if charged by the seller)$735.00 Total+$ 57.60 Sales Tax ($720 X 8%)$792.60 Total Amount ChargedVastly Improved Search & Sort ToolsUnlike Amazon, Columbia would offer excellent search and sort tools. If you wanted a Dutch Oven, you could search and sort by size, AND shape AND color AND price AND user reviews.Columbia would accept both narrative written and verbal search requests. You could tell Columbia:“Show me red Dutch Ovens between six and eight quarts that have a customer review score of four or better and that cost under $125. Sort them from the cheapest to the most expensive.”After you looked at the results you could narrow them further by telling Columbia, “Now, show me only oval not round Dutch ovens.”Improved ReviewsColumbia would use AI to read and distill both customer reviews and published third-party reviews of each displayed product into a “Columbia Review Summary” of two or three paragraphs.AI Product RecommendationsFurther, Columbia would use AI to compare and contrast the reviews for all the items in the entire product category to come up with a Columbia Pick for the “Best Product When Price Is No Object” and the “Best Product Considering Price.”In our Dutch oven example, Columbia would scan all the customer reviews and published reviews for the ten Dutch ovens it showed you and give you a Best Overall and Best Buy product summary and product recommendation.Marketing ColumbiaColumbia would heavily market itself as “The first place to go to buy anything. Every purchase earns a 5% to 10% refund.”New Product PagesColumbia would have a New Products section that would show only new products first offered for sale within the last three months.Any seller could add any new product to this section, and if the seller wanted, it could offer special, additional, new product discounts that would be paid as a credit to the customer’s Columbia account.New Product Section OrganizationThese New Products could be viewed in many different ways:Chronological orderAlphabetical by Product TypeAlphabetical by Vendor NameIn ascending or descending order by price after deducting discounts and rebatesAll the product search and sort tools would be available for the New Product pages.Product Requests From CustomersColumbia would accept customer requests for products they would like to see added to the site and would then contact sellers of those products and invite them to add them to the site.Columbia’s MarkupColumbia would enable lower prices by charging sellers a 15% fee instead of Amazon’s 30%.Drop Shipping Instead Of WarehousingTo cut costs, Columbia would not warehouse products. Instead it would forward orders to sellers and sellers would ship directly to customers from their own facilities with Columbia collecting shipping fees, if any, at the time of sale. Columbia would hold the funds in its account until customer delivery was confirmed.Tipping PointA pull-marketing site won’t work unless and until its product inventory becomes so vast that people will use it by default. Amazon has already reached that point, but it lacks many of the features that a superior pull-marketing site would have.UnknownsCould a new company reach that tipping point?Would the drop-shipping model work or would sellers skimp on order-processing facilities and so disappoint customers with slow delivery that the entire business would fail?Columbia would have to accept returns and issue credits. Would sellers cooperage with Columbia over returns’ refunds or would that be such a bone of contention that the business would fail?Would the AI reviews and recommendation system work as hoped?Would sellers be willing to allow this site to undersell their existing retailers? In my Nikon example, would Nikon be willing to see its camera sold on Columbia for $735 plus sales tax when its existing brick-and-mortar dealers were selling the same camera for $1,000 plus sales tax?Would Nikon even be willing to allow the camera to be sold for $915 ($1,000 less a $100 rebate plus $15 shipping) in competition with its dealers who would be selling the same camera for $1,000?I don’t know.What Will Marketing Look Like Twenty Years From Now?My prediction is that something like Columbia, maybe a new company, maybe a vastly improved Amazon, will exist twenty years from now.— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)To see a list of my other columns, go to: www.Medium.com/@DavidGraceAuthThe Pros & Cons Of Push And Pull Marketing was originally published in Decentralize Today on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.