Word of Mouth

Push or Pull?

A fundamental questions asked by most marketers when designing a marketing strategy. The best ones are known to have both push and pull. In other words, creating a demand for a certain product or service by advertising directly to end consumers, but at the same time, create some kind of incentive to push the same product at the retail level.

Seth Godin introduces another approach where one would flip from Push to Pull or vice versa depending on the demand from individual consumers. He gives the example of blogger and followers subscribing to their blogs. He explains that when viewers visit the blogs, it s a pull structure where they go and seek the information at the specific URLs, but once they subscribe to their favourite blogger’s RSS, the information is delivered to them on a regular basis, thus becoming a push strategy.

I think this is a most valuable observation. If there were a way for companies to measure the degree of interest in their consumers and alter their strategy accordingly, it would be a lot more cost-effective.