Several different promotion strategies may persuade consumers to buy.
Modern consumer promotion strategies may vary greatly, but the end goal is always the same: convince a customer to make a purchase. Some of the most popular strategies have simple names, such as the push or pull methods, and they are commonly used because they have proven to work. Any method that brings the customer to a retail establishment to buy a product is an effective way to promote items to consumers.
Push Strategy
The push strategy for promoting a project involves marketing heavily to retailers who deal directly with the customers. In this case, promotions, wholesale pricing or other incentives are used for distributors and retailers in the hope of putting a product into a large number of stores, who can then bombard the consumers through their own efforts. A push strategy focuses less about individual consumers, but concentrates on sellers instead.
Pull Strategy
A pull strategy is named as such because it focuses on interesting the consumer enough to "pull" the product from the manufacturer by requesting it from retailers. This is a consumer promotion strategy that focuses directly on the individual consumers as opposed to retailers. There are many specific promotional ideas that a manufacturer may consider that fall under the general umbrella of "pull strategy" when marketing or promoting to consumers. These may include: samples, coupons, loyalty programs, rebates, incentives or contests. They are all designed to pull individual consumers into interaction with the sellers, so that a large number will request a product and the retailer will have no choice but to carry it on the shelves.
Push & Pull Strategy
The "push & pull" strategy combines the two consumer promotions. In this case, both distributors and individual consumers are targeted at the same time using a wide scatter-shot method of marketing. The most common example of this is with cars and dealerships. A larger manufacturer may give incentives for individual dealerships to sell a certain model of vehicle, then the dealerships take advantage of commercials and add in their own marketing to encourage individual consumers to buy the vehicle model that they are promoting.
Tags: individual consumers, consumer promotion, large number, promotion strategies, Pull Strategy