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 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... 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.