With a week to go until Christmas the silly season is now in
full swing – the annual prize fight between the big British brands for the best
Christmas TV ad has already been won by John Lewis (in my
opinion), and the remaining contenders for the Christmas single steeplechase are
putting in their final sprint to the finish. But in the Techtopia, the world
looks a little different, and a couple of things that appeared in my Twitter
feed last week have prompted me to do some thinking. The first has been the growing
buzz around the concept of Growth
Hacking and its impact
upon Marketing in general, and the second, seemly disconnected, was this
absolute (Christmas) gift
from Canadian airline, Westjet.
Firstly, let’s talk about Growth Hacking, where did it come
from? The fact it arose was pretty understandable – start-ups are small and
agile and out of necessity marketing tasks often fall to an engineer. Given
this, and the engineer’s comfort with data, the focus on user analysis to
affect marketing is a logical outcome. Techtopia, though, can have a pretty
blinkered world view, and it carries a prejudice against “traditional”
businesses. In this context, a data driven approach to marketing must have
seemed incredibly new and revelatory. Attach a label to it (including the
inevitable use of “hack”), attend a few conferences, and bingo, you have a new
‘disruptive’ force to take on the business world.
As you may have guessed, I am something of a sceptic about
the rise of the Growth Hacker. Initially my scepticism arose mainly because the
term was poorly defined and the actions undertaken by self-proclaimed
practitioners – essentially heavy use of data to identify and acquire new users,
and to improve product – were really just plain old marketing. Non-tech
companies have been conducting data-focused customer acquisition for decades –
examples such as customer loyalty programmes, sales data generated by register
receipts and market research – are nothing new. The really clever
marketers, such as FMCG giants Unilever were doing the same for product
development by blending the techniques above with product and consumer
behaviour research. Ironically, if there’s anywhere that has had a “traditional”
divide between product and marketing, it’s the Tech world itself. The other
main difference is that in the online world customer and user data is
ludicrously easy to come by, Marketing departments of even 15 years ago would
have given their eye-teeth to have the data that we can get from online
analytics. But it doesn't mean they weren't trying to do so – frequent flyer
programmes weren't created to give you free flights.
However, as Growth Hacking has evolved, it has become
something more substantial than a slide deck at a tech conference. It is more
defined, and is now crucial to some pretty impressive actions which I’d argue
go beyond just analysis and display genuine creative thinking, such as the Air
B’n’B case study in Andrew Chen’s article from the link above. I’d be willing
to agree that Growth Hacking is indeed a new marketing discipline – folks like Patrick
Vlaskovits are pretty bullish and compelling on this point – and this is
genuinely quite exciting, but it doesn't change the fact that Growth Hacking
still sits firmly in the realm of Marketing.
So why does this matter? It matters because the underlying
assumption that Growth Hacking is somehow different to Marketing betrays a
glaring lack of knowledge of how businesses outside Tech actually work. It is a
classic case of that tiresome Techtopian tendency to appropriate something from
other areas of business, sometimes out of ignorance, then claiming it as unique
to Tech – like a Bolshie teenager who claims his favourite artist is unique
despite them sampling everyone from The Beatles to John Lee Hooker (you can
Google him). It’s actually a bit embarrassing to see it happen so often.
More important though, it matters because at its essence
Growth Hacking is a tactical discipline – it is based on a series of actions
that aim to address current problems and it prioritises short-term growth
(hence the name) above all else. Because of this it is not strategic, and as
your start-up grows, Growth Hacking alone will not be enough to build long term
market value. Having a strategic understanding of the relationship between your
company and its customers must become the priority. In his article about Growth
Hackers, Ellis
admits this much – seeing the role as a necessary hybrid until a company grows
to a certain level. At this point, the Growth Hacker assumes a role amongst a wider
team of Marketing disciplines, a specialist role certainly, but part of a team.
Returning to Vlaskovits, his belief that the best Growth Hackers use a medium
that is as disruptive as the message itself is straight from the traditional
media buyer’s playbook. But this is where I take issue with Chen’s view of
Growth Hacking as well as anyone who refers to the “death” of Marketing.
Growth Hacking is not disrupting the marketing team because
that assumes that Marketing is somehow a stable place. Marketing as a function
constantly evolves to take advantage of new opportunities to reach audiences
and sell them new products; in the last century we've gone from the telegraph
to the Internet, picking up radio, cinema, television, colour television, cable
television, the Web, social media along the way just to name a few. We've gone
from push marketing to pull marketing where customers (and therefore marketers)
have much more say in the product development process. Each of these changes
brought new challenges, new forms of measurement and new opportunities, as well
as new specialists disciplines into marketing. But through them all, the basics
of marketing remained the same.
Which brings us all the way back to that viral gem from
Westjet. At the same time I was reading about the death of marketing at the
clammy hands of the Growth Hackers, my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn feeds
were lighting up with the story of a flight of normal people who saw their
Christmas wishes appear on a baggage carousel. My friends talked about the
general awesomeness of the idea and the film; my business contacts talked about
the genius of the business itself; and my marketing comrades shook their heads
and just said “I wish I’d done that”. But the point is this – one Marketing
department did do that (with the help of a very clever ad agency) and probably
at surprisingly little cost. As a result, the people on that flight will
probably remain loyal to Westjet, and all around the world people who have
never heard of Westjet may just think about doing so if they’re ever in Canada.
That, right there, is a growth hack from a traditional
Marketing department.
Many thanks go to Peter Thomson for his feedback and advice with this post.
Made it this far? Please share this post or leave a comment (or both).
Many thanks go to Peter Thomson for his feedback and advice with this post.
Made it this far? Please share this post or leave a comment (or both).