Customer-Focused Marketing: Pull vs. Push

The big trend in marketing today is to be “customer-centric,” to think more about the customer and what they need. At Wharton, Jonah teaches the core introductory marketing class to incoming MBAs. He talks a lot about being customer-focused instead of product-focused, and starting with the customer.

But in sales or marketing, we often end up trying to push what we have rather than being customer-focused. Rather than trying to make what we can sell, we often try to sell what we can make. We think about what we already have and how to sell that.