Pull marketing and new product launches

My recent post about marketing futures

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/will-marketing-evolve-from-fiend-to-friend/

resulted in a request for more detail on pull marketing’s use in the context of new product launches. How can a customer find out about new products if they aren’t being pushed?

Firstly, I don’t think push will become extinct, just be substituted by pull a lot, so there could still be limited use of traditional techniques. Substitution rarely reaches 100%. A regular customer might be happy to be told about new products if a company is very careful not to bombard them with too much junk mail. But that doesn’t duck the question. New products can come from a new company. How does that work with pull?

A long time ago I used to work in computing, doing systems performance analysis, round about the time object oriented programming was becoming fashionable. One of the ideas already well established was the remote procedure call, RPC. A device somewhere, anywhere, could offer a service. Any program running anywhere could call on it using an RPC. The device new the service was available because it was noted in a directory of services. The service didn’t advertise itself, it was just listed on the directory. Programs needing it would check the directory for the type of service they wanted, essentially pull marketing. Phone directories (remember them) used to work the same way. Open source databases of products could simply mimic that. There is no need to pay for ads that way, and no need for an intermediary other than the database itself.

Directories are useful and are a big part of pull. You only see stuff when you are looking for something in the same genre. We are used to search, but using something like Google only works if you can manage to wade through a million intermediaries clogging up all the pages before you get to the provider you want. Lifestyle directories work far better, being provided by magazines or organisations or people you trust.

But perhaps the best form of pull directories for new products are shops, very familiar indeed. A shop has what you want to buy, and while you are buying it, you might see many other things you never knew even existed, some of which you then can’t resist. It is serendipity that makes the shop profitable, and that makes the outlet for new products.

So there is no new magic needed to use pull techniques to launch new products, it is just relying more on the well established channels we already have. And the best thing is that most people enjoy the shopping process when it presents new and interesting products alongside what they went out for.

I do feel that web shops like Amazon could do a great deal better in showing you other things you might be interested in. The ‘other people who bought this also looked at this’ is useful, but it isn’t very serendipitous. The filed of variation needs to be bigger. When we first considered internet shopping even before the web was here, we imagined virtual shopping malls. The graphics didn’t allow that for many years but now that the graphics is there, the shops and the malls still aren’t. OK, they are in virtual worlds, but not properly for the real world. It would be a prefect way of doing it on games consoles where pseudo 3d environments are the norm.