Defining A Growth Hacker: Growth Is Not A Marketing Strategy

It seems like people are constantly trying to get this new job title of "growth hacker" to stick by defending and redefining it over and over. Usually that's an indication that the title is superfluous and ultimately pointless.

Marketing is marketing is marketing, stop renaming it. Also, growth is absolutely a marketing strategy...in fact, it's one of the main goals of marketing.

This is the first time I've read anything about what defines a "growth hacker". The people quoted in the article seem so eager to assert that they are not marketers, yet they seem to have a tenuous grasp on what marketing encompasses.

Although I work as a developer now, I did an entire business degree and had to study a fair bit of marketing along the way. From day one, it was made very clear that marketing isn't just amount advertising and promotion. Instead, we were taught to view marketing as something that is integral to product development.

It begins before the product even exists, to research the market and talk to potential users before development begins. This continues throughout development, and feedback and hard data are used to shape development of the product. The article,s assertion that marketing typically ends after user sign up is also incorrect, at least in any company that has been doing it properly. Marketers love hard data, and aren't going to stop paying attention once someone becomes a customer. They know very well, and have for decades, that current users are a key source of data needed to drive ongoing product development decisions.

Of course, that is how it works in an ideal company. Perhaps in the kinds of companies that TechCrunch focuses on, marketing has traditionally been done very poorly, so there isn't much recognition of what it really is. The risk in reinventing the wheel in this case is that it will be done poorly, ignoring hard-won lessons and repeating mistakes.

I'm all for advancing the state of the art in marketing, but I'm just not sure that calling yourself a growth hacker and pretending marketing is something that it really isn't is the most effective way to do it.

I'm pretty much convinced that the GH movement is merely a recognition that us product management folks now have a deeper pool of data on which to base our decisions. This is, in the bigger scheme of things, a recent development and not available to product managers across all industries.

I welcome the controversy. Eventually GH as a buzzword is going to fade away; those left standing will have simply added GH to their personal toolbox. 'nuff said.