Clicksharp Marketing

Every marketing initiative is, at its foundation, either a push or a pull. (What is the difference?) Campaigns may feature a healthy dose of each, but if you boil every move down to its nature, it does one of two things:

• It PUSHES your product in front of its target market.
  • Perhaps the most famous television commercial of all-time, Apple’s “1984″ ad run on Super Bowl Sunday, introduced the Macintosh and showed consumers something they’d never dreamed of. (watch video)
• It PULLS your target market to the point of sale.
  • The U.S. Armed Forces use a variety of pull strategies to encourage enlistment. “The Few. The Proud. The Marines.” is a slogan aimed at getting young men and women out of the living room and into the nearest recruitment office.

Maki’s post on DoshDosh Internet Marketing covers a lot of the fundamentals when applying this content to marketing your business online: PUSH is about a “focus on the features of your product or service and…a direct response from the targeted audience.” Whereas PULL is more a brand building strategy–in which the objectives of the marketing plan may supercede the needs of the target. But only in the short run, of course.

Think about why you’re selling your product in the first place

1. Did you strike gold with a radical innovation?
2. Is educating your consumers a key determinant of the product’s success?
3. Will they see it coming?

If so, you want to PUSH this product in front of customers, because it might be too unique to stand on its own legs at first.

A PULL strategy would make more sense if:

1. You found a way to deliver a well-known product cheaper than everyone else.
2. Your value proposition includes service delivery as a differentiator from your competition.
3. Your business model depends heavily on upselling or cross-selling.

Marketing consultants make a living by taking a close look at the client’s business model, product line, industry and competitive environment. Once you’ve chosen your strategy, how do you mobilize your digital marketing resources accordingly?

Stay tuned for Part 2.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 @ 8:56 pm on the category Marketing Theory, Small business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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