Marketing strategy has undergone a fundamental shift, yet many businesses continue to operate with outdated playbooks. Whilst we’ve moved beyond the binary world of push and pull marketing, most companies haven’t recognised that success now demands a choice between two distinctly different approaches: Pizza Marketing and Content Magnet Marketing.
After years of observing both spectacular successes and catastrophic failures across diverse industries, I’ve identified that a key differentiator isn’t budget, creativity, or even timing. It’s strategic alignment with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) segmentation depth. I’m referring to how narrowly or broadly you can define your ideal customer, and how that precision (or lack thereof) should influence your marketing approach.
The Death of Traditional Push-Pull Thinking
Push and pull marketing served us well in simpler times. During my time at Thomson Holidays, I witnessed this dynamic firsthand. Thomson operated a sophisticated pull strategy as the market leader. Creating demand that drew customers towards our brand through advertising, then relying on travel agents to fulfil that demand. My role involved working with National Accounts to ensure our pull strategy succeeded by removing the friction within the travel agent chain that might otherwise lead them to sell competitors like Airtours, who operated primarily through push tactics – incentivising agents and driving products through promotional campaigns.
It was a beautifully simple ecosystem when it worked. But even then, I could see the cracks forming.
But today’s consumers don’t live in such neat categories. They research on TikTok, purchase on mobile, engage on LinkedIn, and recommend through WhatsApp. The traditional funnel has exploded into what I call the “customer constellation” – a complex web of touchpoints that defies linear thinking.
This complexity has given rise to two effective approaches that work well in our fragmented world.
Pizza Marketing: The Art of Coordinated Omnipresence
Pizza Marketing is ecosystem marketing perfected. Like a well-made pizza, every slice must work harmoniously with the others. You can’t just focus on the base and ignore the toppings, or perfect the sauce whilst burning the crust.
This approach requires coordinated activity across all marketing channels, with each element reinforcing the others. Think of how John Lewis executes their Christmas campaigns: television adverts create emotional connection, social media amplifies the message, in-store experiences bring it to life, email marketing drives action, and PR extends the narrative. Each “slice” serves a distinct purpose whilst contributing to the whole.
When Pizza Marketing Fails Spectacularly
I’ve witnessed countless Pizza Marketing disasters, and they almost always stem from the same root causes:
The Multi-Agency Mess: Different agencies running different channels with different messages, different brand guidelines, and different success metrics. It’s like having multiple chefs in the kitchen, each making their own pizza.
The Quarterly Quarter-Turn: Marketing teams shifting focus every quarter based on the latest trend or executive whim, never allowing the ecosystem time to mature and interconnect.
The Channel Champion Problem: When organisations reward channel performance rather than system performance, creating internal competition rather than collaboration.
Coca-Cola represents Pizza Marketing at its finest. Their “Always On” strategy recognises that their primary goal isn’t to convert heavy users (they already drink Coke), but to ensure that the 60-70% of consumers who drink only 1-3 cans per year choose Coke when they do indulge. This requires consistent presence across every touchpoint where beverage decisions are made, from sponsoring the World Cup to partnering with McDonald’s to optimising distribution placement.
Content Magnet Marketing: The Power of Magnetic Focus
Content Magnet Marketing flips the script entirely. Instead of trying to be everywhere for everyone, you become unmissable for someone specific. You create content so compelling, so precisely targeted, and so valuable that your ICP is irresistibly drawn towards it.
This approach demands ruthless focus and deep customer insight. You’re not casting a wide net; you’re creating a powerful magnetic field that pulls the right people towards your brand.
Bilt: The Magnet Marketing Masterclass
Bilt Rewards has perfected this approach by identifying a hyper-specific ICP: young renters who want to earn rewards on their largest monthly expense. Rather than competing in the crowded general rewards space, they created content and partnerships specifically for renters.
Their masterstroke is the “Roomies” series. A weekly mockumentary following 25-year-old Ellie from Ohio, navigating New York City life. Shot in “The Office” style, the series lives on entirely separate social accounts (@RoomiesRoomiesRoomies) and has achieved over 8 million views and 130,000+ followers across TikTok and Instagram. Here’s the magnetic genius: ten episodes in, Bilt hasn’t been mentioned once, yet viewers regularly discuss the brand in comments and educate each other about the platform.
Their content strategy doesn’t try to appeal to homeowners, car buyers, or general finance audiences. Instead, they create entertainment around the universal experiences their ICP faces: roommate drama, career pivots, and adulting challenges. This magnetic focus has attracted their exact target audience whilst remaining invisible to everyone else, and that’s precisely the point.
Liquid Death: Chaos That Attracts
Liquid Death appears chaotic from the outside, but its content strategy is magnetically focused on a specific psychographic: people who want to rebel against both boring beverages and corporate wellness culture. Their punk rock approach to marketing water creates such a strong magnetic field that their audience seeks them out, shares their content organically, and becomes brand evangelists.
The proof of their magnetic power lies in the queue of brands desperate to partner with them. Dan Murphy, Liquid Death’s SVP of Marketing, reveals that 73 brands are currently interested in partnering, with brands seeing them “a bit like a Saturday Night Live stage” due to their ability to cut through the noise. Rather than brands having to continually fill the leaky bucket across multiple channels, they’re drawn to Liquid Death’s magnetic audience of 7 million TikTok followers and 7.3 million Instagram followers that generate over 30 billion media impressions annually.
Their partnerships with E.l.f., Van Leeuwen, Yeti, Sheetz, and Depends aren’t random; they’re strategic collaborations where partners often cover production and media costs, enabling Liquid Death to reduce its ad spend. The E.l.f. “Corpse Paint” collaboration hit 12 billion impressions in two weeks and sold out in 45 minutes. Demonstrating exactly what happens when you create genuine magnetic pull rather than trying to push messages across fragmented channels.
Their content, from sponsoring underground music to creating intentionally controversial campaigns, repels the mainstream market while irresistibly attracting their core audience and the brands that want access to that engaged community.
The Strategic Decision: Which Path to Choose?
The choice between Pizza Marketing and Content Magnet Marketing isn’t about preference or creativity. It’s about the depth of your ICP segmentation.
Choose Content Magnet Marketing When:
- Your ICP is Highly Segmented: You can describe your ideal customer with surgical precision
- You Understand Their Content Consumption: You know exactly where they get information and how they prefer to receive it
- You Can Afford to Repel: Your business model doesn’t require broad market appeal
- You Have Deep Category Expertise: You can create content that demonstrates genuine authority in your niche
Choose Pizza Marketing When:
- Your ICP is Broad: You serve multiple customer segments or have wide appeal
- Occasional Purchase Behaviour: Your customers don’t buy frequently, so you need a consistent presence
- Complex Purchase Journey: Multiple stakeholders and touchpoints influence buying decisions
- Market Share Objectives: You’re competing for share of a large, established market
The Implementation Reality
Both approaches demand excellence, but they require different capabilities:
Pizza Marketing needs orchestration skills. The ability to coordinate multiple channels, agencies, and campaigns whilst maintaining consistency and measuring system-level performance.
Content Magnet Marketing needs depth and focus. The ability to understand your ICP so intimately that you can create content they can’t ignore, even if it means accepting that 90% of the market will never engage with your brand.
The Danger of the Middle Ground
The biggest mistake I observe is attempting to combine both approaches. Companies try to be everything to everyone while also creating magnetic content for specific niches. This “hybrid” approach typically fails because it lacks both the coordinated omnipresence of Pizza Marketing and the magnetic focus of Content Magnet Marketing.
You end up with mediocre content that fails to compel anyone and fragmented campaigns that fail to build system-level momentum.
Moving Forward: Making Your Choice
The future belongs to businesses that recognise this fundamental choice and commit to executing one approach with excellence rather than attempting both poorly.
Start by honestly assessing your ICP segmentation depth. Can you describe your ideal customer with such precision that you could create content specifically for them? Or are you serving a broader market that requires a consistent presence across multiple touchpoints?
Your answer should determine your strategy, and once you’ve chosen, commit completely. Half-hearted Pizza Marketing creates indigestion, and unfocused Content Magnet Marketing repels, not attracts.
The brands that thrive in the next decade won’t be those with the biggest budgets or the most creative campaigns. It’ll be those who understand which game they’re playing and play it better than anyone else.