Question

More and more companies have moved away from mass marketing (Push Marketing )and toward target marketing that includes concepts of Pull Marketing, mass customization, multi-channel, and the product/service life cycle known as "The Long Tail". What are your ideas and understanding of why this is occuring? What are the forces (economic, cultural, etc.) behind this change? Where is this all headed?

Answer 1

Push marketing is what you think of as traditional advertising. You send images and ask out to the world, and you try to bring in leads. Advertising fliers, postcards, billboards, and radio and television advertisements are all examples of push marketing.

While push marketing is traditional and it does build brand awareness, it's challenging and expensive. To engage in effective push marketing, you need to target your messages and do a lot of market research to make sure that you're marketing the rights goods and services to the right people at the right time.

With push marketing, you work to target specific groups and use the information from the push campaign to further refine your information about prospective leads. If you send out information about baby products to an area where there are many young families, you can gather information about who buys and who doesn't. With push marketing, you target your audience, and ideally, it's that target audience who comes in the door.

Pull marketing is a different game. Pull marketing means that your business becomes a draw to your customers. Your customers come to you, and you may not know much about who they are. However, you can find out why they're there, and this will help you become more effective at your pull marketing.

Pull marketing may happen due to good word of mouth and your community reputation. Active pull marketing can also involve creating content that your leads enjoy. However, it's the focus on the prospective client that really defines pull marketing. Focusing on pull marketing makes you a more customer-oriented business.

A business that wants to pull people in focuses on the user experience. When someone enters your business, you ask them about their needs, not so you can send them advertising material but so that you can help them. They're satisfied, and they speak about you in the community. You use the experience to inform future offerings at your business because you now have a deeper understanding of what your customers need.

For your business, it's much less expensive to engage in pull marketing. You provide great products and exceptional customer service, and your customers respond. You don't need to spend money on paper, digital, or radio advertising.
You can learn and share. By creating web site content or helpful seminars for your clients, you can share your knowledge and bring in a customer base that respects you for it.
You can use your data to create more pull marketing experiences. You'll still gather data about your customers, but the data you get will be focused on ways to create incredible experiences for your future customers.
Finally, pull marketing just feels good. The reason you're in your area of business is to support your clients and pull marketing is all about this support