The "Pull" Era

"I will do what I want! I will not do what you want."

That's the consumer attitude today. Gone are those days when consumers were more or less beggars. Today consumers are choosers. With neck to neck competition in the consumer market, biggest challenge a product faces, is to sell itself to the choosy consumers.

Product has to change its behavior towards the consumers. Earlier a product was taken to the consumers and was sold, but today a product has to address the consumers who have a need for it.

I still remember, a year ago I was getting 5-6 sales call on my mobile everyday! Tired of those calls, I had planned to stop using it. But by the time I could execute my thoughts, those calls reduced drastically. Not sure if it is because of the huge economic downturn or the calling approach had reached the flag-end of its life cycle. However, no calls as of today but the new trend is SMS. I am flooded with SMSs asking me to get in touch with them if I were interested. This only means that a product cannot force itself into the consumers but can ask the consumers if they are interested in it. It is a Consumer-Driven-Market and not Product-Driven-Market.

In this Consumer-Driven-Market it is best to ask the consumers what they want / need and address their wants / needs. Of late, a marketer has plenty of tools/ platforms to find the needs and wants of a customer and address the same. For example, a person interested in buying a new laptop may end up searching for "Best Laptops" on Google before buying it; in which case, it is the best fit for a lap-top vendor to address the searcher’s query. The success rate in such a scenario is higher and very efficient. Likewise, this could also apply to any or all the products the Target Audience is searching for. Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduced a revolutionary tool: Search Engine. This Engine brought along with it, a revolution in the Marketers world. It forced the marketers to look beyond the conventional marketing techniques. It also made Marketers happy, for it is highly measurable unlike many other techniques.

Digital Marketing is now a serious part of most of the marketing spends across products and services. From Search to Banners, from Twitter to Blogs, so on and so forth we can see most of the brands present online. This presence was mainly driven by consumers themselves. Consumers started talking Brands, Products and Services over the Social Networking Sites, which forced the products and services to address their communication. This is how the brands got online. Hence the Brands have to do what consumers want. They can push if and only if all the “consumers wants” are addressed.

Early Unique Innovation (EUI) is the key to long term success. Having said that, it is more important to continue innovating to stay unique. In other words, it is very essential to Think Ahead, while others are thinking of entering the competition.