Push or Pull

It has been a century old Questions, which is more effective and efficient? Pushing products onto customer or rather pulling them towards the products that they need?

Do anyone really have an answer to this? Historical facts has shown that Product pushing has been very successful with multiple sales achievement and success stories. At the end of the day, it's all about selling your products, Attracting your clientele, and last but not least profit for the company.

With so many quality competitors and not mentioning the quantity of competitors in the market, what is going to be the best strategy for your company.

Push and pull are more or less the same in that they focus on the same idea:

• Push: pushing your products toward the market.
• Pull: pulling so that the market itself comes asking for your products.

In my humble opinion, I have always lean more towards Pull. I do believe that in the long run, pull has a higher success rate of attraction and loyalty when it comes to re-purchasing. It allows the clientele to associate something that they need to your brand or company. Rather than a product being push into someone, it could leave a bad experience or sour taste for the clientele, and trust me it is not a pleasant experience at all.

What is a Push Strategy?

Push Marketing is about “pushing” all of your products to the client, even though they have no intention of buying them yet (or they don’t know they need them).

What that means is we start from the idea that clients are not looking for you. That’s why you need to find potential markets, segmented groups of clients who have an unsatisfied need or an unsolved problem. You focus on that target audience and create the need to buy your product and, on top of that, you are going to be the best option to meet that need (so they don’t choose a different competitor after you’ve put in all the legwork).

This strategy requires a lot of effort. Remember that the customer “is not aware that they need you at this point” and you have to send them your offer.

This strategy works best when:

• There is a huge supply of the same product and you need to compete on price or quality. For example, if you sell stationery or IT consumables, there are lots of suppliers with a similar catalog.
• Your products are in low demand and your brand isn’t very well known among users.

What is a Pull Strategy?

This is the opposite of Push because we are now talking about attracting. In this case, clients are already looking for you to solve a need. They may even already know you. However, they are tired of ads that seem to stalk them, and their attitude toward the brand is often worse as a result of Push strategies. That’s why Pull can be so powerful.

In this case, we don’t follow anyone. Instead, we get them to enter our shop voluntarily, so their perception of our brand is much better.

To summarize, there is no such thing as a perfect sales strategy. It all boils down to

1. Expectation
2. Sacrifices along the way
3. Commitment
4. Goals and timeline.