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Growth Hacking Is Bull

marketingland.com

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Re: Growth Hacking Is Bull

#11

Post by fleitz »

bsgreenb wrote: post #6

Almost every term in marketing/sales is imprecisely defined and most writing in the field seems to be around making things more complex and vague than they need to be. Kind of like the postmodernists, it's as if they want to convince you that there's some extra layer complexity which only they can understand.

And if you've watched nerds sell you'd agree that there's some extra layer of complexity which only marketers understand.

If you haven't read them you may enjoy Deschooling Society by Illich or The Spectacle of Society by Debord, though Debord gets a little postmodernist/heglian at points.

http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf

Re: Growth Hacking Is Bull

#13

Post by squigs25 »

Few companies actually use growth hacking as I understand it: taking advantage of [social] networks to grow exposure exponentially

It's not SEO, and it's not SEM. It's making your product interesting and accessible to social networks, and allowing for organic growth.

BuzzFeed growth hacks (that's basically their entire business model), and while it may fall under the broader term known as marketing, it's not traditional marketing, and it absolutely deserves it's own name.

I think the bigger problem is that people who misuse growth hacking for their marketing department.

Re: Growth Hacking Is Bull

#14

Post by ID_HOME »

jasallen wrote: post #4

Like any fashionable word, "growth hack" is being assigned to all sorts of things that it wasn't meant to mean. This article attacks those other things, and not the core of what 'growth hacking' means. A code hacker is doing things creatively and differently and coming up with a unique way to accomplish something that is difficult to accomplish following standard protocols like 'coder' would. A growth hacker is the s…

How about we just call it marketing?

Or "internal marketing" when it's directed at what's left of your poor working culture... Great way to boost cynicism and turn over in your smartest employees!

Re: Growth Hacking Is Bull

#15

Post by crazygringo »

jasallen wrote: post #4

Like any fashionable word, "growth hack" is being assigned to all sorts of things that it wasn't meant to mean. This article attacks those other things, and not the core of what 'growth hacking' means. A code hacker is doing things creatively and differently and coming up with a unique way to accomplish something that is difficult to accomplish following standard protocols like 'coder' would. A growth hacker is the s…

Exactly what I came here to say -- people are forgetting the 'hacking' part.

By definition, growth hacking is not established techniques, it's coming up with new clever ways to get people to spread the word about your product, which are often going to depend on your specific product or product category, and not be generally applicable. As soon as a technique is widely known/defined/used, it ceases to be growth hacking and is then just part of regular marketing.

Re: Growth Hacking Is Bull

#16

Post by clavalle »

So, a marketer is upset that marketing wordplay has been applied to the act of marketing?

I've never seen growth hacking as anything other than marketing but with a focus on trying the unusual or the usual in a different way and measuring the results immediately. No big mystery but interesting in that novel approaches or surprising results come to light more often than traditional marketing.

Re: Growth Hacking Is Bull

#17

Post by dlu »

seanellis wrote: post #10

I am largely to blame for the recent tirade against “growth hacking.” I’ve let the term be bastardized and redefined a lot since my original blog post on it back in 2010 http://www.startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-ha... . I wrote that blog post primarily for startups that had achieved product/market fit. The idea was not to replace marketing, but to create a category of marketing activities that have a…

I like your idea that the first marketing hire at a startup should have "growth as their true north."

Part of the reason I wince when someone says, "growth hacker" is that too often I've seen someone with that title parachute in, turn all the knobs up to 11 and then run off to be airlifted into another team's domain. I think a lot of folks treat growth hacking as magic pixie dust that they can sprinkled around to make numbers go up. I'm sorry to say that my introduction to the term was well after it became bastardized.

Personally, I think we a new phrase for all this.

Re: Growth Hacking Is Bull

#18

Post by dsugarman »

growth != marketing because growth is marketing union ramping up operations, not sure if growth hacking tries to incorporate building scalable company structure and/or recruiting and/or incorporating software. Keeping a team that is growing super fast on track is a full time job. In my opinion growth is just such a broad term..

Re: Growth Hacking Is Bull

#19

Post by bsgreenb »

fleitz wrote: post #11
bsgreenb wrote: post #6

Almost every term in marketing/sales is imprecisely defined and most writing in the field seems to be around making things more complex and vague than they need to be. Kind of like the postmodernists, it's as if they want to convince you that there's some extra layer complexity which only they can understand.

And if you've watched nerds sell you'd agree that there's some extra layer of complexity which only marketers understand. If you haven't read them you may enjoy Deschooling Society by Illich or The Spectacle of Society by Debord, though Debord gets a little postmodernist/heglian at points. http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf

Nerds' general inability to sell isn't because they don't understand marketing lingo, but because they lack an intuitive sense of people/markets. Inconsistent and vague buzzwords do nothing to bridge that chasm.

Re: Growth Hacking Is Bull

#20

Post by dchuk »

I wrote this blogpost over a year ago now: http://www.layeredthoughts.com/startups/growth-hacking-is-bs...

Danny Sullivan's tweet last week (quoted in OP's link) is almost word for word my thesis in my blog post.

In fact, if you search for "Growth hacking is bull" in google, my post is right above this one now.

I don't really have a point to make here, other than there's quite a bit of overlap between this post and mine.

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