
Growth Hacking Is Bull - r0h1n
http://marketingland.com/growth-hacking-is-bull-69635
======
tptacek
The difference between "growth hacking" and "online marketing" as I
understanding it is that the former involves dedicating engineering effort:
building repeatable automated systems that operate at scales that are
untenable with manual effort.

Marketing, as a business objective, has historically been underserved by
engineering. "Marketing engineering" occupied approximately the same status
level as internal IT. "Growth hacking", as I understand the term, involves
increasing the status and priority of marketing-focused engineering to be
lateral with product development.

~~~
wcummings
I work in ad tech, and while this isn't the sort of position I'd take, I do
fit the bill qualifications-wise in some ways (IMO). Someone who understands
both the business and technology, involved in marketing/advertising. There's a
slew of Professional Services positions in my industry that are basically
outsourced growth hacking.

------
dchuk
I wrote this blogpost over a year ago now:
[http://www.layeredthoughts.com/startups/growth-hacking-is-
bs...](http://www.layeredthoughts.com/startups/growth-hacking-is-bsits-all-
just-marketing)

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.

------
jasallen
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 same thing --
but for marketing and/or sales. By definition, once someone else shows the
way, it's no longer hacking to do it; but the first one to do it, was a
hacker.

I would argue that airBnb's cross-posting _was_ hacking. The first person to
some up with "give away the razor and charge for the blades" was a growth
hacker even though that term didn't exist for another 100 years. Plain and
simple, new and innovative ways to build brand awareness or increase sales is
growth hacking.

Call it marketing hacking if it makes you feel better.

Edit: to add to my point: why use the term hacker _at all_ if growth hacker is
BS term for a certain kind of marketer, isn't 'hacker' a BS term for a certain
kind of technologist? /rant

~~~
crazygringo
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.

------
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.

------
vollmarj
I use the title Growth Hacker in the sense that it is a hacker (programmer)
focused on growth (marketing). In this sense, it is simply a term for a
marketer that writes code. So then "growth hacking" should simply mean writing
code to do marketing for you. This is indeed different than marketing alone.

~~~
thirsteh
Growth Engineer.

------
puppetmaster3
If you use the word "hack" and "hacking" as synonym for "unprofessional" (ex:
he is just a hack), then growth hacking makes sense that it's not good. (Also,
when non pro's write code, that is a hacking)

~~~
hawleyal
That's not what hacking, in this sense, means.

Hacking is getting something done creatively. As in, hacking away at a
problem.

------
seanellis
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...](http://www.startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-hackers/) . 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 direct attributable impact on growth.
Startups are always on the brink of death. They don’t have the luxury to focus
on things like awareness building or to prepare 50 page slide decks on the
demographics of the customer. I wrote that a startup’s first marketing hire
should have “growth as their true north.” They shouldn’t be outsourcing and
managing vendors, the person should be a hands-on “builder” and optimizer of
growth programs. In order to help make the concept stick, I put a name to it.
On that day the term “growth hacker” was born.

I won’t rehash why all this debate is actually a good thing. Read my comment
here [http://www.growthhackers.com/dhh-growth-hacking-a-cool-
sound...](http://www.growthhackers.com/dhh-growth-hacking-a-cool-sounding-
euphemism-for-making-the-doer-feel-good-about-using-the-same-old-sleazy-
marketing-tricks/) for my thoughts on that…

Since my original post in 2010, I’ve been happy with certain evolutions of the
term. One is that I think large companies should have a group that is
exclusively focused on managing the activities that are directly attributable
to growth. Companies like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have had these groups
for a long time. Bigger companies have the luxury of specialization so they
can have research departments, PR departments and I think “growth” should be a
focused discipline within larger organizations. Part of this group’s objective
should be to create a culture of growth across the entire organization and
help each department evaluate and measure activities that have a direct impact
on growth.

“Growth hacking” may or may not be the right word, but it’s the one I used and
it stuck.

Much as SEO is a categorization of marketing activities that improve a
websites search ranking, you can think of growth hacking as a broader
categorization of marketing activities that directly and measurably impact
growth. In my original post, I suggested that the role should be easier to
hire than a VP Marketing, since the scope of focus is actually smaller. I also
suggested that some of the best growth people I’ve met have engineering
backgrounds. It wasn’t until Andrew Chen’s post “Growth Hacker is the New VP
Marketing” that people really began to focus in on engineering skills as a
prerequisite for being an effective growth hacker. He also falsely positioned
it as a replacement for VP Marketing. I both disagree that it is the new VP
Marketing and I disagree that engineering is a prerequisite. A VP Marketing
needs to have a broader understanding of all of the disciplines within the
marketing function. Some growth hackers will be good for this and some won’t.

Lastly, you could easily argue that SEO as a concept doesn’t need to exist
because marketing already exists. But SEO is a subset of marketing activities.
Growth hacking (to me anyway) is a subset of marketing activities too. The
most powerful online marketing tactics often involve exploiting the unique
advantages of the internet, which generally require some engineering skills.
It’s easier to run these experiments if you don’t need to beg an engineering
department for help. So engineering skills are definitely an advantage, but
results trump skills.

Apologize to all that the conversation will likely to shift to a “defense of
growth hacking” for a while. But eventually we’ll be back to the sharing of
effective ways to grow the user bases for products that customers love.

~~~
jd007
> Growth hacking (to me anyway) is a subset of marketing activities too.

I've always thought that it was the other way around, i.e. marketing is one of
the things you can do in growth hacking, but not everything. To me growth
hacking means doing/focusing on things that help grow the business, and
marketing is just one of the things you can do. Other things that you can do
to help growth include actually improving the product and reduce friction,
which are not marketing. Maybe I've misunderstood the term "growth hacking"
then.

~~~
ryanhuff
Its probably better represented as a venn diagram. Applies to potentially many
disciplines within an operation.

------
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.

------
fleitz
Actually they're doing branding by distinguishing themselves from marketers
who offer an unbranded growth hacking experience.

Sounds like someone is pissed they got out branded by a bunch of hacks. This
is the marketing equivalent of every hacker post that Facebook and Twitter are
just big CRUD databases.

------
rsobers
I view growth hacking as online marketing done by people who don't need
permission or help to get things done.

Traditional online marketers are paralyzed by their lack of technical and
design skills. The best they can do is brainstorm ideas and spend money on
ads.

------
austenallred
The fact is, it doesn't really matter what was intended of the word when it
was created. "Growth hacking" on its surface seems to imply beating systems
for the sake of growth. Sean Ellis, who is happy to tell you he coined the
phrase, considers most marketing for the sake of driving growth "growth
hacking." But, despite the fact that what I do probably matches both of those
definitions, I would still _never_ call myself a growth hacker.

The reason I don't call myself that is because calling yourself a "growth
hacker" is akin to calling yourself a "social media guru" or a "rockstar
programmer." It's a buzz-word that's been taken over by people who have no
idea what they're talking about. And if you have to beat your chest and call
yourself a growth hacker, chances are you're not.

Are there some incredible marketers out there who beat and create systems to
cause growth? Absolutely. But I don't think many of them call themselves
"growth hackers" either. Interestingly enough I find a few brilliant minds
when I'm roaming amongst the blackhatters of the world. The seedy underbelly
of the Internet has some really sharp people in it determined to continually
out-engineer Google, beat other systems, or just brute force something. And
sometimes what they do is pretty ingenious. You can actually learn a lot from
them if you look at the principles they use, legitimize them, and use them for
good instead of evil. There are a lot of script kiddies to be sure, but that
caliber of brilliant marketer, whether it be a spammer who uses it for evil or
some of the marketers causing explosive growth at young companies rarely beat
their chests and assign themselves buzz-wordy titles. They don't have to.

Just like social media experts don't call themselves "gurus." No one of any
high level of legitimacy has ever assigned themselves the term "Thought
leader." In the same way, 99% of the people who call themselves "growth
hackers" are at a marketing intern equivalent level.

It's just turned into another phrase people who don't know what they're doing
throw around because it sounds cool.

------
brandonpindulic
This is my response --[http://brandonpindulic.co/2014/01/10/growth-hacking-
defined/](http://brandonpindulic.co/2014/01/10/growth-hacking-defined/)

Summary: This is simply an opinion piece that I wrote to try to get the point
across that growth is everywhere, and constraining it to a definition is
simply counterintuitive.

In short, if it grows your business, then by all means do that, whatever it
is, and to keep learning, experimenting and testing new strategies.

------
bsgreenb
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.

~~~
fleitz
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](http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/DESCHOOLING.pdf)

~~~
bsgreenb
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.

~~~
true_religion
Maybe its poor semantics, but I'm not really sure where this nerd/marketer
divide is coming from.

One of them is a type of person/personality and the other is a job
description.

------
pushkargaikwad
Similar thread/conversation happening at [http://growthhackers.com/growth-
hacking-is-bullshit/](http://growthhackers.com/growth-hacking-is-bullshit/)

anyway I always felt Growth hacking is very generic term whose definition will
always be different depending on the context.

------
adventured
"the same year Jason Calacanis started his highly-publicized crusade against
the online marketing industry and, in particular, against professionals
specializing in SEO and social media."

The same year Calacanis decided to found Mahalo, designed specifically to
profit from abusing SEO 'growth hacking.'

------
wiggle_bar
Waaaahhh, somebody used a new term to describe tried and true marketing
activities to make them sound new/sexy/novel.

People reapply the same concepts and ideas, but with new terminology all the
time. It's good marketing :)

Now, I must get back to word sculpting...

------
tomasien
Saying what Airbnb isn't growth hacking doesn't mean it wasn't. There were no
protocols into Craigslist for cross-posting and they had to hack them together
to get growth - that's growth hacking.

------
programminggeek
I really like the word Technical Marketing because it does a better job of
encompassing a broader use of technology to enhance your marketing.

------
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..

------
michaelochurch
"Growth hacking" is like an SUV: an attempt to take something stigmatized as
effeminate (minivans) and masculinize it, to the point that it develops its
own mancult.

~~~
ta43434
I like the analogy, but I think SUVs were really a way to exploit a loophole
in emissions regulations. Because of the technical definitions, SUVs count as
trucks not cars for emissions standards.

