Rant About Growthacking

My rant on how the term growth hacking gets on my nerves

I hate it when somebody says to me that I’m a growth hacker. I’m not a growth hacker!

OK, sorry to offend any of you calling yourself growth hackers out there, but the sheer term growth hacking makes my stomach twitch.

On more than a few occasions I had to explain supposed differences between growth hacking and plain ol’ marketing. But who cares? Apparently I do. And here is why.

Simply put marketing is the strategic act of creating demand and acquiring customers. Why do people need to make something more out of something so simple?

There was duct tape marketing, guerilla marketing, growth hacking,… well those are only buzzwords, nice ones, but still only terms for doing marketing. Fancy phrases attached to not so fancy ideas and honestly, they’re just plain tiring and unnecessary 99% of the time.

Growth hacking seems to be widely defined as the combination of marketing, data analysis and a bit of simple programing. Well, actually when you combine those three terms you get — marketing.

Marketing people have been using and gathering data as far as the term “marketing” was first used. Anybody that has any academic knowledge of marketing realizes that. The best way to demonstrate that fact is to take a quick look at short overview of marketing (models) history (via DK — The Business Book):

1961 The Marketing Science Institute is founded. 1969 US academic Frank Bass publishes a seminal marketing model that can be used to predict demand. 1970s Complex measurement models and decision-making models are developed. 1980 The launch of in-store scanners at checkouts gives marketers new data and prompts the development of sophisticated new models. 1982 The journal Marketing Science launches, focusing on mathematical models for marketing purposes. 1990s Intelligent marketing information systems computerize many routine modeling functions, providing daily updates and projections.

True, we now gather and analyze data at a much deeper level. The modern tech product allows us to know far more about our customers than the marketeers of the old. But that’s just the technology of data gathering that has changed.

We use data to refine products, define offerings and develop marketing messages that cater in the best way possible the ideas to our customer base, and then split test various ideas pragmatically and let the data speak for itself. This isn’t hacking, this isn’t magic…it’s just plain ol’ marketing at with a higher degree of data gathering and a higher level data analysis, all thanks to the technology that’s available to us now.

Most of us marketing people in the technology industry know how to write one or two lines of code. It would be silly of us if we didn’t, after all, we do sell software. “You first have to be the bull if you want to be a matador”.

Another thing is the word “hacking” itself. When somebody says something is “hacked” I assume it just done in a hurry, botched or it’s just a rough mock. For example, the time I “hacked” my amplifier and it ended up short circuiting it. In my dictionary, the word hack does not equal quality. Hack is a quick fix, a temporary solution, a prototype, something that you bang out at 2 am in the garage, a piece of code you made to prove that your concept could work. Would you hack your products marketing? would you do a quick marketing fix and then let it be like that?

Growth hacker!?! It’s the same BS as those idiotic titles for developers. Ninja developer, Node guru, PHP Master… Barf! Would you ever introduce yourself as a “Ruby on Rails Rockstar”, “Angular Samurai”, “Marketing Cowboy” or similar? Hopefully not. Well, actually marketing cowboy sounds kinda cool. But, imagine trying to explain to somebody what marketing cowboy does.

The startup world is constantly trying to separate itself from the traditional business world with new job titles and business techniques. It’s all just a waste of time, there’s no need for the separation. The end result is the same either way. We may use different techniques and technologies depending on the market we’re in, but our job as marketing people is same in every which market and is still the same as it was ninety, fifty or thirty years ago.