Customer Pull vs. Customer Push

Definition

Customer push (make-and-sell) is a business approach where the organization decides what products or services to produce, then marketing creates demand to move those offerings to market. The organization is "inside-out": designed to maximize utilization of existing assets and capabilities. Customer pull (sense-and-respond) is fundamentally inverted—the organization captures actual demand intelligence from customers and designs its offerings to meet those real needs. This is not simply a sales tactic; it requires different organizational structures, measurement systems, and operational design.

In the Book

Barlow, Parry, and Faulkner argue that "make-and-sell" is characterized by the assumption that customers will buy variants of what's already being produced. Marketing departments push these products to generate demand. In contrast, organizations using customer pull "capture and exploit the customer demand intelligence that arrives every day" through frontline operations. The authors illustrate the distinction through a car sales example: a dealer with green cars in stock discounts them to customers asking for red, then incorrectly interprets the sales data as "customers want green" and makes more. A pull organization instead captures the request for red, builds to that demand, and serves customers without discounts.

The authors emphasize that customer pull requires more than attitude change—it demands redesign of the business arrangement. Organizations trying to compete by moving work offshore or investing in automation while still operating on make-and-sell logic are optimizing the wrong thing. In a pull system, organizations work to known demand rather than forecast, produce only what's requested, keep some assets idle to build flexibility, and treat idle time as opportunity to improve the value chain. The pull system is harder to forecast but more profitable because it eliminates inventory, discounting, and the waste of making things customers don't want.

Why It Matters

The pull/push distinction explains why commodity businesses face margin compression. When organizations remain in push mode while competitors move to pull, the push organization either loses customers or competes on cost with lower-cost producers. Pull organizations can differentiate on responsiveness, variety, and customer success—factors that cost-focused competitors cannot match. This model creates urgency to understand customer context and purpose, which drives continuous innovation. The shift from push to pull also fundamentally changes the relationship between frontline staff and management: in push, frontline staff execute; in pull, frontline staff sense and management responds to that intelligence.