Marketing is the price you pay to get attention. All marketing is a hack for attention. Being data-driven and figuring out the 1% of your digital ads that are working, then capitalizing on them, is a hack. Using a unique marketing distribution channel or method is a hack. Embedding the marketing into your product is a hack. These are all "growth" hacks.
Cutting in front of the line is a hack to get your lunch faster, but if everyone's doing it, the hack starts to lose effectiveness.
Not that digital ads today are ineffective, but I do think its methods have reached notable saturation points.
I think you're painting with too broad strokes by likening all marketing to hacks. Marketing is more like finding alpha in a changing, inefficient market. There are going to be short term and long term strategies that work. The only guarantee is that things will change with time and those with more information will beat those with less.
That sounds right. I look upon the word "hacking" favorably and use it broadly to mean something like "manipulating a system for a particular outcome" rather than just This One Simple Trick, sorry if I wasn't clearer.
I like the guarantee. That's why hacking in the conventional sense today-- which needs constant awareness, involvement, adaptation, experimentation to find out what works, non-codified intelligence, and dealing with the reality of a system -- can beat the process du jour. It might become the new canonical process if everyone else starts doing it.
Sometimes I feel like long-term or well-thought-out strategy is the hack in a sea of self-proclaimed hackers who focus on useless wins and optimizations.
Cutting in front of the line is a hack to get your lunch faster, but if everyone's doing it, the hack starts to lose effectiveness.
Not that digital ads today are ineffective, but I do think its methods have reached notable saturation points.