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?
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.
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. :-)
arkades|7 years ago
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.
philipodonnell|7 years ago
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?
threeseed|7 years ago
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.
gk1|7 years ago
This is a list of marketing strategies and tactics that happened to work for these particular companies/individuals.
philipodonnell|7 years ago