When Push Comes to Shove
By Dan R. Greening
Interactions between a marketer and a buyer can be characterized as "pull" or "push." In pull marketing, a person with a need requests product information from the marketer. But in many cases, people don't actively request information for several reasons: They may not be aware that there's a problem, or their need isn't great enough to bother identifying who solves the problem or even if there's a solution at all. This is where push marketing comes in: letting people know there's a solution.
But push marketing is inherently problematic. Several technologies have been thrown at the problem, but only one shows signs of sticking—and it works only if it's used correctly and in context. But we'll come to that later.
Even before the Web became commercially available,
it was clear that Web pages would be an attractive marketing medium. But there was, again, an inherent problem: Web pages supported only pull marketing.
A marketer couldn't send Web pages to potential customers but instead had to wait until the people came to the Web site.
Marketing, Interrupted
This gave rise to various push-marketing systems. Pointcast, for example, was a screensaver that downloaded and displayed news and advertisements when your computer was idle.
Pointcast became popular, and then quickly turned into a productivity problem. It consumed valuable bandwidth. And it was incredibly distracting. Our retinal neurons are prewired to sense movement and send an alert to our brains.
