Kiss On The First Date

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What’s the difference between push and pull marketing given the Internet?

I am asking this question to try and understand the impact blogs and online newsletters (email and RSS) have on brick to brick (off-line) marketing.

I am also asking because I am writing a book called “Kiss On The First Date: What Lovers Know That Marketers Cannot Remember” on my experiences as a naive boy and the lesson I learned while trying to get my first kiss and how that lesson applied or did not apply to my off-line marketing efforts.

This is what some of the experts had to say on push and pull marketing:

Please note: I don’t necessarily agree with all the views by the experts because they may not have considered relevancy and and that fact that we will always use push marketing:

Mirek Mirpo said:

PUSH - you don’t care whether the audience is interested in your message, or not - very aggressive.

PULL - you try to target your audience contextually, behaviorally so that your message is more likely to be relevant to the audience, hence more welcome and more effective.

John Naughton – Leeds Met Keynote

In thinking about the future, the two most useful words are ‘push’ and ‘pull’ because they capture the essence of where we’ve been and where we seem to be headed.

Broadcast TV is a ‘push’ medium: a relatively select band of producers (broadcasters) decide what content is to be created, create it and then push it down analogue or digital channels at audiences which are assumed to consist of essentially passive recipients.

The couch potato was, par excellence, a creature of this world. He did, of course, have some freedom of action. He could choose to switch off the TV; but if he decided to leave it on, then essentially his freedom of action was confined to choosing from a menu of options decided for him by others, and to ‘consuming’ their content at times decided by them. He was, in other words, a human surrogate for one of BF Skinner’s pigeons – free to peck at whatever coloured lever took his fancy, but not free at all in comparison with his fellow-pigeon perched outside on the roof.

The other essential feature of the world of push media was its fundamental asymmetry. All the creative energy was assumed to be located at one end (the producer/broadcaster). The viewer or listener was assumed to be incapable of, or uninterested in, creating content; and even if it turned out that s/he was capable of creative activity, there was no way in which anything s/he produced could have been published.

Looking back, the most astonishing thing about the broadcast-dominated world was how successful it was for so long in keeping billions of people in thrall. Networks could pull in audiences in the tens of millions for successful and popular broadcasts – and pitch their advertising rates accordingly. Small wonder that one owner of a UK ITV franchise famously described commercial television (in public) as “a licence to print money”.

But in fact the dominance of the push model was an artefact of the state of technology. Analogue transmission systems severely limited the number of channels that could be broadcast through the ether, so consumer choice was restricted by the laws of analogue electronics. The advent of digital technology changed all that and began to hollow-out the broadcast model from within.

The Web – is the opposite of this: it’s a pull medium.

Nothing comes to you unless you choose it and click on it to ‘pull’ it down onto your computer. You’re in charge. In the words of Elizabeth Murdoch, the Web is a “sit up” medium, in contrast to TV, which is a “sit back” medium. So the first implication of the switch from push to pull is a growth in consumer sovereignty. We saw this early on in e-commerce, because it became easy to compare. Because analogue transmissions on adjacent frequencies could interfere with one another. You can read the full story here.

John Duff had this to say about push and pull marketing:

Push advertising in Internet terms would be anything you are actively driving to customers, whether they want to hear your message or not. One great example of this would be sending our regular e-mail blasts. Now most of the customers you are sending an HTML newsletter to probably signed up in some way, shape, or form some time ago. They may or may not be interested any more. They key to sending out effective email blasts is to send relevant messages to an interested audience. Don’t send a list of Porsche owners a good sale on your Kia line.

Pull advertising consists of RSS, blogging, and pay per click advertising. A customer is choosing to actively subscribe to your message or is seeking you out on their own terms. Most of these customers feel less threatening or advertised to because they are deciding when to hear your message.

Both are very effective forms of media and should be bundled together in an appropriate marketing package. I hope I was able to answer your question. I’d be happy to clarify further.

Jori Ford said,

Push is a bit more aggressive, however I would say in terms of e-mail blasts, aggressive is only for unsolicited e-mails without a double opt-in. Because users have the ability to unsubscribe to a list they have opted into, it’s safe to say as long as the information is not entirely ad based and not every day, twice a day.

In terms of business and online promotion, push marketing would involve engaging users that maintain large lists such as Internet marketers who use the above mentioned method, to promote your products as an affiliate.

Pull marketing engages your user(s) and entices them to return. The big part about this type of marketing is that it’s only as affective as the method you utilize to inform Internet users that the resource is available. A very useful technique to engage in in order to show your blogs relevance and make use a high quality e-mail opt-in list is to do a joint venture with another blogger or an Internet marketer who supplies related content or makes use of a list of users who would find your content useful.

In my professional opinion, I’d say that an initial online press release of the up and coming book which references the blog would be an excellent beginning and a non-aggressive approach.

Ensure your blog is setup with the ability to sign-up for your e-newsletter, updating users on the book release, and subscribe buttons for your RSS feed(s). Then update the blog with the progress of the book. Engaging visitors in a poll or asking them for feedback via your comments would also be a very “pull” type of marketing that engages the user to interact with you and keeps them coming back for more.

Additional reading on push and pull marketing:

• An interesting article on how to use both push and pull marketing for your blog.
• Most marketers understand that they need to add more ‘pull’ marketing to their marketing mix to attract the right customers, but a scarce few can really draw a crisp distinction between pull marketing and its opposite counterpart, push marketing.
• I enjoyed this analogy of the scent: The right scent, carefully chosen, captures the interest of a customer. Instead of using cartoon tendrils, we maintain an online scent trail with words and pictures that reinforce the scent, and clicks that take the customer closer to the goal. If we don’t interrupt the scent trail, it will lead the customer where she wants to go (which also happens to be where we want her to go).

If you have any comments, questions or ideas on push and pull marketing then I urge you to share them with me as I may include them in my book

Have fun

Johan Horak

Yes it is. The only thing dead about push marketing is how people use it. Push marketing will always be part of marketing and no one will stop that. But people being interrupted by irrelevant push marketing will and are already ignoring outdated push marketers.

Today, you are spammed with push marketing wherever you go.

• As you drive down the main street you see the bill boards and flashing neon signs.
• At night real estate agents, insurance agents and vacuum sales people keep knocking on your door.
• Direct sales pieces and other junk mail flood your post box.
• The car salesmen sends you sms’s to come and drive the new model.
• Television programs are interrupted with messages from their sponsors.
• The Internet bombard you with advertisements.
• Everyone tries to sell you something by interrupting you.

How can you reduce the risk of being ignored when you use push marketing?

I can think of three ingredients that makes push marketing more effective. They are relevancy, your ability to add value and two step marketing (I will explain how push marketing can be made effective with two step marketing in a follow-up post).

Let me explain by defining relevancy and then a few examples:

Relevancy is defined as the appropriateness and usefulness of information. If information “fits” the purpose for which it is intended it is relevant information.

When you read the definition it is obvious why push marketing, as used in the past, is being ignored today and will be ignored in the future if the message is not appropriate and useful.

• When you use Google to search then Google push you with relevant advertisements. As you may or may not know; Google Adsense is a very sophisticated system that only push you with advertisements relevant to your search term. For example, if you search for “permission marketing” you’ll see ads on the right of the search page with relevant ads. And the more relevant the advertiser’s ad is to the search term the cheaper it becomes to be on top of the list of ads. Read more here on Adsense Relevancy. Therefore Google’s push marketing rules are adding value to your search and by adding value they are making more money and the advertiser can make more as well.
• When you have an email newsletter (or RSS), that people subscribed to, you have an gentleman’s agreement that you will send the subscribers useful and appropriate information. As long as you stick to the agreement you can become successful. But when you start pushing for the sale or you push irrelevant information you are past tense.
• The car salesmen asks you if he should notify you via sms on maintenance schedules or any critical info regarding your car and you agree then he may push you. But as soon as he sends you sales promotions he is on thin ice and you will ignore him.
• Let’s consider direct mail. The best example is a direct mail piece from Readers Digest. They send you and envelope with amazing offers on the front and a long letter inside. As with all push marketing their success depends on the numbers of letters they send out. But they have learned that specific groups of people are more inclined to subscribe to Readers Digest. The problem these direct marketers have is how to define a relevant list. It’s not easy but the more relevant the list they use the more effective push marketing becomes.

One more point to clarify on why I say that push marketing is not dead. You may be pro-pull marketing and you should be. But when you pull someone towards your blog, for example, you have a newsletter, and the reader subscribes then you will become a push marketer as soon as you send your first newsletter.