To promote their products or services, companies may choose between push and pull strategies. A push strategy concentrates promotional activities on distribution channels and encourages customers to buy products or services using incentives, such as discounts (Vieira et al., 2018). In a push strategy, the company first produces products and then attempts to sell them to customers through promotional activities (Vieira et al., 2018). An example of a product that uses a push strategy is medications. According to Said et al. (2019), pharmaceutical companies use a push strategy to motivate pharmacists to promote their products to customers. This promotion strategy includes free samples of promoted drugs, discounts, discount accumulative programs, and gifts to pharmacists when they reach the required sales volume (Said et al., 2019). Price-related incentives seem to be the most effective in increasing customers’ purchasing intentions.
A pull strategy aims at raising customer brand awareness and encouraging customers to make purchase decisions. In a pull strategy, firms first identify customers’ needs and then design products or services to satisfy those needs (Vieira et al., 2018). In this case, promotional activities are focused on advertising and use such means as social networking, word of mouth, media coverage, email marketing, and market positioning (Thakuri, 2020). An example of a service using a pull strategy is food and drink service. For example, Thakuri (2020) reports that Feel Good Café actively uses email marketing as part of its pull strategy. It sends emails to its customers, in which it congratulates them on their birthdays and other important events and makes special offerings.
According to Daou (2020), today’s marketing prefers to pull strategies over push strategies because it does not intervene with customers’ lives. A pull strategy allows companies to build customer relationships and engagement (Daou, 2020). However, Thakuri (2020) points out that the disadvantage of a pull strategy is that it does not work effectively if brand loyalty is low. Vieira et al. (2018) argue that push strategy is effective in motivating customers to make a purchase, while a pull strategy is necessary to increase the firm’s performance by improving customer retention and buying behavior. Thus, it may be concluded that a pull strategy is more successful for brands, but a push strategy may be helpful to win over new customers.
References
Daou, L. (2020). Social media vs traditional marketing. In N. Azoury & L. Daou (Eds.), Business and social media in the Middle East strategies, best practices and perspectives (pp. 3-16). Palgrave Macmillan.
Said, Y. B., Bragazzi, N. L., & Pyatigorskaya, N. V. (2019). Influence of sales promotion techniques on consumers’ purchasing decisions at community pharmacies. Pharmacy, 7(4), 1-12.
Thakuri, B. H. (2020). How a small firm survived loss of main customers: In the reflection of pull strategy. Journal of Marketing Vistas, 10(1), 48-58.
Vieira, V. A., Costa, M., Almeida, M. I. S., Costa, M. P., & Coelho, R. L. (2018). When and how pull and push promotion strategies ‘pay off’: Shopper experience using social media and mobile applications. CLAV 2018, 1-16.