I Fucking Hate Marketing

I fucking hate marketing. Growth hacking? Don’t get me started…

Being a relatively recent recruit to the murky world of marketing I have become increasingly frustrated with the seemingly endless semantic debate around the terminology that defines a successful marketer in the digital space. Since Sean Ellis coined the term “Growth Hacker” you’d think the world had, in some significant way, changed. Needless to say, that isn’t the case. As an industry we are guilty of perpetuating the circular semantic debate as to what growth hacking is, desperately trying to reinforce the notion that “to growth hack” is a legitimate compound verb. Bollocks, at least in the manner it is broadly understood.

To some extent this article could easily become part of the problem, just another professional shouting into the faces of their contemporaries and potential customers in a vain effort to differentiate their carbon-copy content “strategy” from that of their competition. “I’m a thought leader! Honest!”. I will sincerely attempt to avoid this, I promise.

So what is left to contribute if one will insist on aspiring to profundity? Well, without apology, this is completely subjective and to some extent autobiographical.

In the beginning, there was light…

A couple of years ago I made the decision to go into business with my friend and brother-in-law Logan. After (many) drinks through the years, we thought we’d found a gap in the market. As a CMO and Co-Founder at a tech start-up he’d successfully and demonstrably leveraged all the techniques, so often regurgitated ad-infinitum, from The Lean Startup, and Dave McClure’s seminal AARRR! presentation and any one of the many new business bibles that clog up my Kindle. On his exit from that business he found himself inundated with CMO job offers from businesses desperate to leverage these techniques but understandably, being of an entrepreneurial bent, he didn’t want to work for anyone again. Thus Rebel Hack, our agency, was born.

Since then I have been on a spiralling journey of learning along with our expanding team as we continue to define what we do, and what the fuck to call it. I’ll be honest, we flirt with Growth Hacking, primarily because it appeals to people who should know better and its a cheap trick to win traffic and start conversations. But what are we ultimately talking about when we talk about what we do to drive growth in businesses? It’s worth thinking about the terminology we freely throw around and think about what it really means and align expectations accordingly.

Firstly, marketing. It is not substantive; in its purest sense it is very much a top of the funnel activity that can deliver results but is ultimately siloed into driving top line awareness and acquisition into a product or service funnel. As a result marketers consider success metrics to be those that are easy to measure and compare: CPC, CTR, CAC are just pulled out of the third party platforms and used to measure performance but more crucially, success. The reality is these are often such a small part of the picture that reporting them and asserting isolated optimisations as success derail the growth efforts of businesses. I won’t expand on this further as my business partner Logan already wrote a great piece about the death of digital marketing and how a new approach has risen from its ashes.

But what is this new approach — Growth hacking?

The idea of a ”hack” has seeped into common usage through its appropriation by journalists, influencers, and marketers and, now, the online hive-mind is obsessed with “hacking” anything and everything from how to pack your holiday luggage into one sock to waterproofing your mobile phone with a condom. For all the amusement, small wins, and YouTube views these activities result in I’m not sure when they graduated from being “tips” and morphed into “hacks”.

The term hacking derived from the communities of programmers who found reward in the intellectual challenge of systematically examining code structure, testing, finding holes and attempting to push through them. Hacking by definition is a long, systematic and deeply rigorous process that takes time, dedication, and a sharply analytical approach. Essentially we’re talking about incredibly complex puzzles, the solutions to which, are hard, hidden, and only discovered through a huge amount of trial and error.

Lets take the highly skilled role of a security researcher or white hat hacker (ethical hacking). They are contracted to evaluate the robustness of a system to compromise from malicious attack. They go about this in 2 ways: penetration testing, whereby they attack a system for technical vulnerabilities; and social engineering, where the researcher attempts to compromise the system by manipulating an individual in an organisation into opening the system to them. Both approaches are high value, high skill activities that can take months of planning, implementation, and nurture. I know this first hand as its something I oversee professionally as one of our services, albeit not one we publicise much. (Incidentally, this is a skill set we’re forced to scale into: when we named the business Rebel Hack we hadn’t anticipated what a red rag that would have been to the hacking community and experienced multiple attacks that took us offline completely 4 times before we got our shit together!).

So we get the idea, hacking is hard. It takes time and a great deal of skill, and (here’s the bit no one likes) shit loads of failures. Therefore this obsession with quick wins that has somehow ended up under the umbrella of “hacking” and seems to permeate all walks of life, has infected otherwise smart, shrewd people in their approaches to driving their businesses forward. As an industry we need to dispel this myth that growth hacking is some kind of magic bullet and that every idea is “basically AirBnB for dogs/tractors/vibrators/whatever”. Fundamentally data and technology has empowered those interested in business and product growth to leverage a huge amounts of information from different places to inform their decisions and redefine marketing as a science, far removed from the Department of Pretty Things. The flip side is that data is not something that can be easily understood or interpreted into usable information and suddenly anyone with a login to Google Analytics is an armchair data scientist.

Consultant-sea..!

The space is awash with consultants, a quick LinkedIn search for the term provides me with 13,584 professional Growth Hackers ready to “hack” your business to crazy levels of success. I assume loads of these people are great, talented professionals, I know a number of them are snake oil salesmen who are talented at promoting themselves, and therefore the assumption is they can do the same for a business. Let’s be clear here, creating a huge following and shaping yourself into an influencer is no mean feat and I salute them for creating a personal brand that people listen to and follow BUT …

“a successful self-promoter, a business growth implementor does not make” ~Yoda (errr probably)

Innovative CEO’s

I speak to CEOs daily who have developed genuinely innovative and exciting new IPs, products, and services that with a realistic and informed approach should have excellent growth and scale prospects. Unfortunately there is a pervasive belief that growth hacking is, like “life hacking” some kind of magic formula that can be leveraged to ensure the growth of their business for little to no investment. There are many ways of moving a variety of metrics, sometimes dramatically, but not all metrics are equal. When I get questions like “Why have we only got 100 followers on Facebook?” I cringe because, unless that metric is specifically tied to behaviours in the funnel that drive value and return for the business in question, it is completely irrelevant and demonstrates that we’re on totally different pages as to the role of a Growth Marketing agency in the business.

A real Growth Hacker is a person who can look at service or product as a machine: to extend the metaphor, let’s say a computer. A computer has many inputs, keyboards, mice, network inputs etc and a few key outputs. To the layman the relationship is simple, you stab away at characters on a keyboard and they are reflected in what is displayed on screen however the technical processes involved in translating these actions into the desired outputs are innumerable and complex. To understand the engineering of a computer system you must understand how those seemingly simple key presses complete a physical circuit that references a character map stored in the keyboard’s own memory board before sending a binary codified sequence through to the USB port of your computer and all that before the computer ‘proper’ even receives the signal.

Without labouring the point any further, this shit is complex!

Business funnels are similar in the sense that their complexity is often hidden behind seemingly simple flows of traffic to a page, app, or CTA however, the reality is deriving any meaning from this means you need to ignore competing platform attribution and figure out a way of reporting on what is actually happening based on unbiased data. Facebook is a great example, those of you who have used Facebook Business and its dashboards will know, that whilst being an incredibly powerful ad platform, it is also really greedy, sucking up credit for any conversion that it most tangentially can, ignoring the impact of any other activity.

Looking at elements of the funnel in isolation is always dangerous and too frequently I see individual, high level metrics being used to calculate targets right down at the bottom of a product. For example: “Right guys we need to get CPC to £0.10 to achieve X number of sales from our media budget”. This kind of logic is fundamentally flawed as it implies an arrogance about the product or service you are selling and smacks of the trope of If you build it, they will come. First off, optimisation expertise only goes so far, costs are determined by the market, not by marketers. Secondly, we need to look at businesses as the complex machines they are and not assume a certain level of performance based on the cost of the fuel you push into them. Similarly individual experiments and tactics do not in themselves produce a sustainable growth engine when viewed in isolation. Each channel be it large, small, digital, offline, will provide different levels of intent, interest, relevance and need. Obviously we aren’t all in position to expend the massive level of resource required to address all of this at once, running an agency I know this better than anyone, but the smart way is to start early. Think about what tools you can plug together to get you close to at least some directional attribution, keep going, add something else to plug a gap, inch towards visibility but don’t, under any circumstances let yourself believe that because of Facebook’s pixel you are entitled to know what action caused a customer to convert.

People cite the stories of unicorns and the amazing growth hacks that took them to market dominance and billions of dollars in revenue from Airbnb with Craigslist to Instagram with cross-platform sharing, these guys didn’t just stumble across these things, they worked for months, if not years to discover these amazing tactics to gain market dominance. Its also worth noting that most unicorns like Uber transcend any particular audience niche and go against the conventional notion of business whereby you attack a niche and dominate. Let us also not forget, most of them achieved these lofty wins on the other side of SIGNIFICANT angel or VC investment, they’re called unicorns for a reason. Have a walk around your nearest WeWork and you’ll notice that it isn’t stable, just lots and lots of tiny cramped offices with people hunched over macbooks trying to carve out something beautiful from an idea they had over a drink 3 years ago.

I hate marketing, why?

I come back now to my deliberately provocative title, I hate marketing. Why? Because, like Growth Hacking, marketing, done properly is not a an addition to a business, it is an integral part of any successful enterprise. Marketing or whatever you want to call it, needs to be attached to your development team, your customer service team, your management team, your PR resource, and whatever else you have going on.

Marketing, for growth at least, is a part of the machine, not something you bolt onto the side of it but something you bake in from day one…