Great growth hack my grandfather did, inspires me still: He opens a restaurant, on a bet, against a competing restaurateur, that he can succeed in an awful location with no signage or parking. On opening night, he hands a wad of money to my Dad and his adorable girlfriend, instructs them to dress nice, take a cab to the airport, tip, and rave about the dinner. upon arriving at the airport, get another taxi, tip, inform them that you've just flown in from SanFran and have heard the food at the 13 Coins is divine and to take them there post haste :) He won the bet.
If I recall correctly, participants of Egypts Arab spring mentioned the same tactic to spread the information about the location of upcoming demonstrations. A few people took cab after cab and kept mentioning that a protest will take place that evening in place xyz. In a few hours the information had spread through the city.
I understand that the term "growth hack" isn't well defined but still - most of these are just old school marketing techniques used by tech cos. A few novel ideas worth learning from but that's about it.
When I first heard about growth hacking back in the day, as distinct from typical marketing, it was defined as engineering the product itself to propagate to new users. The “classic” example at the time was building social features into programs - Eg, spotify’s social integration.
Thing is, to the best of my knowledge, it (a) never really grew to anything beyond social integration, and (b) was soon expanded in scope to just mean “all marketing by people who wish they were in Silicon Valley,” and subsequently to “all marketing.”
But it had a real definition behind it at some point.
I agree. Growth hacking was putting features into the product so that use of the product would inherently serve as influencer marketing and social signaling by its very nature. Think 'ask your friends for goods' from early Farmville that was required to play at a high level, the first action when joining LinkedIn being to invite your other professional contacts to LinkedIn, even way back to the "free email with Hotmail" signature watermarks so everyone receiving your email learned about Hotmail. This was considered novel because it provided a mechanism for truly rapid growth for companies with plenty of active users but very little or no incremental revenue to justify the advertising spend to acquire them. The idea was how to do marketing without paying for advertising, and what did we do to every problem in the 2000's: hack it!
Now its just any new or novel marketing idea from anywhere if the returns are superior to traditional marketing, which is fine, but what is the term now for products with growth features built in?
Marketing is a dirty word to technoligsts. It implies the product needs manipulation to gain adoption... growth hacking strategies have been used by direct response marketers for over 100 years... while it originally was about piggybacking off an existing network of users and merged into data driven lean startupy tactics and eventually spread to all types of marketing...its intent was always the same...to give a new cool word to technologists so they dont have to feel dirty about doing marketing...
The truth is, everything that touches a prospect or customer is marketing. Treating your employees well is marketing. Your product is marketing. You are marketing...everything that impacts a decision to buy, even indirectly, is marketing...
It never was a dirty word...but as a marketer, I consider growth hacking to be a dirty word nowadays :(
Read the book Growth Hacking which is quite clear about what the definition is. The idea is to have a cross functional team focus on a specific metric eg. user engagement or churn. And then rapidly prototype and experiment with different techniques to drive the metric in the right direction.
It is just a new name for a combination of existing practices. But then again so is Agile and it changed the way software companies worked.
Even by that definition, this list doesn't make sense. There was no "cross-functional team focus[ing] on a specific metric" for the ice-bucket challenge. Cash incentives (PayPal example) have been around for decades—that's not a growth hack.
This is a list of marketing strategies and tactics that happened to work for these particular companies/individuals.
"Growth hacking" was always, since the very inception of a term, just rebranding of "marketing" in a way that makes it sound cooler. It's just a purified buzzword. In the tech space, having yourself called "growth hacker" was seen as more cool than "marketer".
I think it was intended to very very high return marketing that was inherent to the use of the product itself, as distinct from traditional marketing where the product was the thing being marketed (selling auto parts) and not the thing doing the marketing (advertising in your free email signatures).
I know dozens of growth hackers and their skills are simply different to traditional digital marketers. It is far more experimental, technical and cross functional. And it will continue to evolve into its own space in the future.
People who think growth hacking = marketing are just as clueless as those who think influencer marketing = Instagram. It's far more involved than that.
They are generally less physically attractive. I was shocked the first time I visited a traditional advertising/marketing company's office.
Edit. Growth hackers are the less physically attractive :) I was shock how beautiful the advertising/marketing people were - there wasn't one average looking person (male or female) in the place apart from me.
Honestly cannot figure out who “they” are in your comment. Who looks better in your opinion, traditional marketers or growth hackers? Were you shocked by how good they looked or how bad they looked?
Every time I start to assume you meant one of them, I get nervous wondering if your shock was pointed the other way. Lol.
I don't think this is a widely agreed definition, I think its just the definition the author provided in the context of that book because it fits the framework the author wants to consult with companies to implement. :-)
There are plenty of legitimate use cases - calendar apps, issue trackers, online games, news sites.
They just tend to be stupidly implemented. If I'm a first-time visitor to your news site, and I haven't even read the article yet, there's about a 0.00% chance I'll allow notifications. Why they don't set a cookie and prompt only once you're a repeat visitor for a while is beyond me.
It's not great when the notification box is styled like native UI to make it seem more legitimate, although it is nice that the page doesn't just flat out request notification permissions.
1) Marketing is far more popular today as it was a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago etc. Especially with the rise of SaaS tooling there has been a lot of innovation and interesting work coming out of this space. And let’s not forget influencer and content marketing both of which are relatively new concepts.
2) Growth hacking is not just about marketing. It is a cross functional system bringing in expertise from engineering, data science, sales, marketing, finance etc. It isn’t specificaly a marketing activity but could be growth hacking against a range of business metrics.
Growth hacking is predominately about online businesses. And it's a pretty solid fact that there are more of those every year than in the preceding year.
And not sure what you mean here. Growth hacking is not just about marketing. There are plenty of growth hacking initiatives for improving financial or business metrics e.g. employee retention.
Might want to read the book about Growth Hacking to understand the discipline and why it is getting more and more popular. It actually isn't just some lame name to describe a few marketing tricks.
Marketing departments everywhere do the same thing you are using to describe "growth hacking." They convene with members of other departments to construct the brand in a way that is cohesive with how the product or service operates (and should be perceived).
> The company grew its user base from 0 to 100,000, largely through the impact of guest blogs on third party sites, written by founder Leo Widrich.
Was a good idea in the olden days, works a lot less now that Google has started cracking down on spammy guest blogging practices.
Facebook:
> To counter such resistance, Facebook has progressively turned off the message facility on its own app and telling mobile users they must migrate to Messenger. The result is a rapid growth curve to underpin the Facebook messaging masterplan.
This is certainly 'effective', but it really, really annoys users, and will probably not work as well for a company with decent competitors. Network effects and being a near monopoly helps Facebook get away with this stuff, but if your small service tries it... well good luck there.
TripAdvisor:
> For instance, Tripadvisor encourages hotels to publicise good reviews by displaying badges. This is good for the hotels in question, but the badges also link traffic back to Tripadvisor and make Google rank that hotels reviews higher in their own search results.
Ah, the old 'have people display a widget that links back to your site' trick.
It's an okay strategy if your reputation is somewhat good or you got in early, but Google has worked to discourage such things in recent years too.
> There was no advertising for Pokemon Go and no explanation of how the game actually worked. All the maker Niantic did was tweet that it was available.
This was also why the game died out so quickly too. Niantic was terrible at communication, and spent weeks seemingly doing nothing to address issues people had with the game. No comments online, no social media posts, nothing about updates with features people were looking forward to...
The result was a huge die off, with things only recovering a bit when they actually opened up and spoke to their customers again.
Either way, the advice is simple:
Remember that what works for a large company or certain brand may not work for you (or others), that a lot of tactics used in the past have been disincentivised after SEO abuse and that your marketing trickery may be your downfall if you don't realise when a change in tact is needed afterwards.
Would it have been fraud if they disclosed it to the investors? Ie is going into a store and buying your product to create an illusion of demand, by itself a criminal fraud?
No. It might have violated their contracts with retailers, but any recourse from that would have been civil, not criminal.
An interesting question is how long it’s material for. Clearly it’s material while it’s a meaningful portion of their total revenue or per-store sales. There’s an argument that buying your own product is material long after real revenue has grown, though, because it’s likely to have an impact if publicly discovered. Basically it becomes a skeleton in the closet, and as long as that skeleton is (a) known to the company and (b) newsworthy (and thus likely to impact the company’s perception and valuation), there’s an least an argument it still needs to be disclosed.
