Push vs. Pull Marketing Strategies and the 4 Ps of Marketing
Push Strategy
A “push” promotional strategy uses a company’s sales force and trade promotions to create consumer demand. The producer promotes to wholesalers, wholesalers to retailers, and retailers to consumers. Mobile phones are a prime example, with manufacturers like Nokia promoting via retailers like Carphone Warehouse. Personal selling and trade promotions (e.g., handset subsidies) are effective. A “push” strategy can also involve direct selling to consumers, bypassing intermediaries (e.g., insurance, holidays), utilizing consumer promotions and advertising.
Pull Strategy
A “pull” strategy relies heavily on advertising and consumer promotion to build demand. Successful pull strategies lead consumers to request products from retailers, who then ask wholesalers, who in turn ask producers. Children’s toys, heavily advertised on television, exemplify this. The BBC’s campaign for its “Fimbles” program, with a Fisher-Price toy deal, illustrates a pull strategy aiming to replicate the success of the “Tweenies.”
Product
A product is anything offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption that satisfies a want or need. This includes physical objects, services, persons, places, organizations, and ideas.
Product Classifications
- Durable: Long-lasting, surviving many uses.
- Non-durable: Consumed in one or few uses.
- Service: Activities, benefits, or satisfactions offered for sale.
Consumer User-Based Classifications
- Convenience: Frequently bought with minimal effort (e.g., newspapers, sweets).
- Shopping: Less frequent purchases, compared based on suitability, quality, price, style (e.g., furniture, clothes, used cars).
- Specialty: Unique characteristics or brand identification, buyers make a special effort (e.g., specific car brands, photo equipment).
- Unsought: Life insurance, home security, blood donation.
Price
Price is the amount charged for a product or service, or the sum of values consumers exchange for its benefits. Pricing strategy follows target market and positioning decisions. For example, Toyota created Lexus to compete with European luxury cars, necessitating a high price.
Place
Place refers to the marketing channel, linking individuals or organizations to make a product or service available to consumers or industrial users.
Distribution Channels
- Direct to consumer (e.g., services, bakery): Manufacturer to buyer.
- Indirect: Involves intermediaries to increase efficiency and reduce costs/risks.
Promotion
Promotion is the process of exchanging information, opinions, attitudes, and feelings. It requires a sender (communicator) and a receiver, often playing both roles simultaneously.
Process Elements
- Intention: Deliberate or not.
- Objective: What the communication aims to achieve.
- Context: The environment of communication.
- Noise: Anything hindering communication (physical or psychological).
- Encoding: Representing the message for receiver understanding.
- Decoding: Interpreting the message.
- Medium: Method used (e.g., spoken language).
- Channel: Route of message travel (e.g., telephone).
- Feedback: Response to communication, completing the loop.