Push vs Pull Marketing | Understanding the Customer Journey

I love talking marketing!  Just the other day, I was chatting with a friend about a concept called: Push versus Pull Marketing. And I wanted to share that concept with you today because I know it’s going to make a difference in how you present your product or service and speak to your customers. 

Push vs. Pull Marketing | Definitions

So, what do I mean by “push versus pull marketing”?  Push marketing is basically when a product is pushed right at you, the customer. Yuck. No one likes that feeling. And I find that just about every business eventually starts to operate from this perspective. Whereas pull marketing is drawing the customer along a journey to show them how you solve their problem...you pull them toward your product instead of pushing it at them.

Unfortunately, a lot of businesses find themselves migrating toward push marketing over time. It’s what happens when you become insular and lack the outside perspective to break away from the push cycle. So you may not even know you are doing it.

Let’s think about it this way: every business has a product or service to sell to a customer...so the basic value flow of the business is: Service or product → Customer → Money goes back to business.

Once this mindset dominates the marketing strategy, then all the materials stem from this perspective. They just showcase the product. They don’t talk to the customer about their problems, values, or emotions. Instead, the potential customer is just blasted about all the “cool features” of your product. And you know that isn’t going to cut it to effectively sell your product.

Even more menacing -- over time, you will start to actually value your product over your customers. You may even start to believe your customers should just be grateful you are providing these features for them. Yikes.

Push Marketing Example

If you haven’t thought of an example of push marketing yet, I’ve got a good one for you: camera makers. They excel at push marketing. Every time a new camera hits the market, they make the same kind of ad. Look at this new, shiny camera from all these cool angles! Look! This camera just opened up so you can see all the neat features! These features are awesome!  

This ad leaves out important contextual information such as: Who is this camera for? What problems do they solve?  How would someone use it? Why would they need these types of features?

These are important questions. And without answering them, the features make no sense outside the insular market. Instead of contextualizing the product, you end up just focusing on creating fancy names for features that you then push on your customers. #Fail for push marketing.

Pull Your Customer Along Their Journey

This ultimately ends up becoming a tip of the iceberg perspective. It’s just seeing a small part and forgetting the chain that’s going on underneath. You’ve lost sight of your customer and the journey they are on.

What’s really going on is you have a customer who has a dream of what they want their life to look like. But while they’re on this journey, they hit some bumps and roadblocks that prevent them from getting to there. A business comes along and provides a product or service that solves their problem and clears the way to achieve the dream state. And that creates a pathway for pull marketing. The pull of the customer trying to achieve their dream allows you to show how your product or service will solve their problem and help them arrive at their dream destination. 

So, how does pull marketing look different from push marketing? Take a look at this ad by Apple. They are super ninjas at pull marketing because they utilize brand storytelling so well.

The brilliance of this ad is it takes the single feature of privacy and puts it in context for the customer. You could try to argue they're using a funny joke so the answer is to make all of the features seem funny and put it in a comical light. But that’s wrong!

What they’re doing instead is much smarter. They’re shifting their perspective from a mentality of pushing features to thinking from the customer’s perspective. What does the customer care about? What ultimately matters to them? So instead of pushing a bunch of features, the creators of this ad took a single feature and showed the customer how it will solve the current problem: information privacy in a digital world. Pull marketing clears the path for the customer to achieve their dream state: a normal private life where no one knows all their personal, electronic information. 

So, instead of overwhelming the audience with completely out of context product features and things that don't make any sense, they're meeting the audience where they're at...and pulling them to the solution. That’s the big difference with push vs pull marketing. Push marketing leaves us at the tip of the iceberg, absorbed with the insular vision of the business. But pull marketing gets at what is really going on with your customer. They don’t care about your obsession with all the features and intricacies of your product. They care about getting to their dream state. Will you provide the solution for them?