From Push & Pull to Presence
- Mar 12
- 5 min read
Why the next era of marketing is more about being discoverable rather than clamoring for attention
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For most of modern business history, marketing was explained through a simple framework: push and pull. We built awareness through advertising and brand campaigns, then pushed products toward the moment of purchase through promotions, displays, and pricing tactics. Along the way, entire marketing philosophies formed around awareness, differentiation, and the belief that if you could shout loud enough, often enough, people would remember you.
But the reality today is less flattering for marketers. Most people know very few brands, and awareness is fleeting and exhausting to maintain. Even the supposedly “cheap” digital channels that once fueled growth get more expensive and less effective every year. SPAM filters and social media algorithms are continually choking off even more reach. Differentiation rarely lasts because competitors can copy almost anything within months. What has always endured are relevance and word of mouth. Relevance shows up wherever people are looking for answers for a need you address, and word of mouth travels wherever people are talking.
The platforms change, and the channels shift, but the dynamic remains the same. The brands that win are not the ones that shout the loudest. They are the ones that are easiest to find, easiest to relate to, and most often recommended.
The Push–Pull Era: Manufacturing Demand (20th Century)
Pull marketing meant creating demand at a distance. Advertising, brand campaigns, sponsorships, and media placements built awareness and preference so that consumers would eventually “pull” the product off the shelf. The goal was familiarity and mental availability. If you had seen the brand enough times, and heard the message often enough, you would remember it when the moment of purchase arrived.
Push marketing lived closer to the transaction. Promotions, discounts, bundling, end-cap displays, and point-of-purchase tactics were designed to nudge the buyer in the final moments of decision. Retailers and sales teams played a central role. If pull created desire, push converted it.
For decades, this framework described how most organizations thought about marketing. The work involved choosing channels, planning campaigns, and allocating budgets between long-term brand building and short-term promotional activity.
The Two-Way Era: When Consumers Got a Voice (Early 2000s)
In the early 2000s, marketers began talking about two-way brands. Forums, comment sections, blogs, and eventually social media allowed people to respond to brands in real time. The popular phrase was that “consumers own your brand.” Brand meaning was no longer created only by advertising. It was shaped by conversation.
Companies responded by building social teams, community management functions, and new digital marketing roles. Listening became as important as broadcasting. Marketers began speaking about engagement, dialogue, and participation. But even this framework is starting to feel dated.
The Availability Era: Discovery Beats Messaging (Today)
Today, the most important shift in marketing is neither push nor pull. Marketing is increasingly about availability. Availability means that when someone is curious about something, your brand can be found. It means the product is easy to understand, easy to access, and easy to recommend. It means information exists in the places where people naturally look for answers. Mobile behavior reflects this: more than half of smartphone users say they have discovered a new brand or product while performing a search on their device, which shows how often purchase journeys now begin with open ended exploration rather than exposure to a campaign. The job of marketing is increasingly to make a brand discoverable and accessible.
Emerging Trends
The Research Economy: Decisions Start Before the Buy Button
Consumers now research nearly everything. Before buying a mattress, a camera, a health supplement, or a software platform, people read reviews, watch videos, browse forums, and ask friends. In one recent Statista study, 98% of U.S. consumers said they conduct some form of online research before a purchase, and 86% reported that customer reviews are their preferred information source, meaning much of the decision is made before the buy button is ever in view.
This behavior places a premium on presence rather than persuasion. If someone searches for advice, comparisons, or explanations, the brands that appear in those moments have an advantage. Not because they ran a campaign, but because they are part of the information landscape.
At the same time, the internet has dramatically amplified word-of-mouth. Customers constantly talk about their experiences through reviews, posts, comments, and everyday conversations. Marketing must show up where people learn, compare, and ask questions, not just where companies place ads.
Marketing’s New Job: Build the Conditions for Word-of-Mouth
Many successful brands now spend less on traditional paid media and more on the foundations that make word-of-mouth possible. They invest in product quality, customer experience, useful documentation, and communities where customers help each other. Empirical work on electronic word of mouth finds that the combination of reviews, eWOM, and the perceived information value of digital advertising can explain around 85% of the variation in brand choice, which means investments in product, support, and documentation increasingly function as marketing spend by another name.
In the availability era, marketing increasingly overlaps with product development, customer support, and operations. Each of these influences what customers say about the brand.
Instead of acting primarily as a broadcaster of messages, the marketer becomes a steward of discoverability, ensuring that when people look for answers, explanations, or recommendations, the brand appears naturally in those moments. Marketers should invest less in shouting about their brand and more in making it easy for satisfied customers to talk about it.
The New Standard: Present When People Go Looking
Advertising still matters. Paid media can help launch products, enter new markets, and accelerate awareness. But it is increasingly a complement rather than the centerpiece of marketing strategy. Gartner’s 2024 CMO Spend research, for example, reports that media investments now consume about 28% of the average marketing budget and that digital channels represent roughly 57% of that paid media spend, even as total marketing budgets fall to around 8% of company revenue.
The real engine of growth is the network of experiences, conversations, and information that surround the product. Brands cannot fully control this ecosystem, but they can participate in it by being useful, visible, and trustworthy. In this sense, marketing is returning to something closer to its roots: connecting solutions with people who need them.
Today’s winning brands that win are not the ones that shout the loudest, but the ones that are easiest to find when curiosity transitions into action. Relevance earns attention. Word of mouth and online communities/forums carry it forward. The rest is simply earning the kind of reputation that keeps showing up in conversations.
Show up where people research, make it easy to understand what you do, deliver on what you promise, and give your best customers something worth recommending and easy to talk about.
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Sources
Statista. Pre-purchase online search habits in the United States. 2024
Academy of Marketing Studies Journal. The Effect of eWOM, Online Review & Rating, and Advertising Information Value on Consumers’ Preference... 2023
Gartner. 2024 CMO Spend Survey… 2024
MarketingLTB. Mobile Traffic Statistics 2025: 96+ Stats & Insights. 2025.
Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) on social networking sites (SNS). via PMC. 2024