I’m Not A Marketer, I’m A Growth Scientist
In Part 1 of this series on Growth Science, we touched on the emergence of ‘growth hacking’ through the viral successes of legendary software companies: Dropbox, Airbnb, & Hotmail (now Microsoft Outlook). We also began to explore the true nature of Growth Science. Despite the resounding successes of the companies listed above, merely adopting their hacks likely won’t cut it for your business. ‘Copycat hacks’ aren’t tailored specifically to your business, product or market, and (even if they are) overuse in the market has stolen their once gleaming luster. So what is growth science if not that button color change that 5X’s your conversion rate? And what separates growth science from traditional, tried-and-true brand marketing? It starts with focus & goals.
Since the time of designer-suited, whiskey-drenched ad men (thanks for the negative priming the bad rep Mad Men) traditional brand marketing has been characterized by informative persuasion with two primary goals:
- Get prospects unfamiliar with your product or services to notice your business exists (aka Awareness)
- Pull prospects into your business ecosystem, capturing info from them that allows continued marketing/persuasion (aka Interest or Acquisition)
That’s it. No responsibility for converting prospects into customers or making sure they stick around..No, No, No — that’s the role of sales & customer service. If we take a peek at the classic marketing funnel, the role of the typical brand marketer ends after ‘Interest,’ or what’s known as the Top of Funnel.
That’s not to say heads won’t roll (the audiophile in me couldn’t resist) if sales don’t start coming through, but the sales team is likely to get the side-eye 1st.
Growth Scientists respect no such restrictions. Rather than remain limited to any single section of the funnel, a growth architect’s ‘True North’ is pure: Growth (coined by growth pioneer Sean Ellis).
In comparison to traditional marketers, the goals of Growth marketers are:
- Architecting growth across all potential touchpoints of the business, including marketing, sales/conversion, and customer experience & retention.
- Implementing strategies for the minimum possible cost through process & experimentation, following a process much similar to that used by research scientists (hence: Growth Science)
- Prioritizing implementation by the expected impact on the growth of the business.
When viewed through this lens, there is significant distance between the role of the traditional marketer & the growth scientist — but the contrasts don’t end with the difference in focus.
Core Differences
The differences between traditional & growth marketers extend across three key areas: Focus, Methodology, & Process.
Traditional Brand Marketing
As we touched on before, the focus of traditional brand marketing only addresses the Top of the Funnel, or Awareness & Acquisition. The traditional methodology in building campaigns (as well as overall strategies) is centered around the following ideas.
History & Competitor Success
The popular investor axiom, ‘Past performance is not indicative of future results,’ certainly applies here — although such advice is rarely followed. Hard-wired human psychology may be at fault here. In new & uncertain environments, sometimes the only data available is historical, & mining this data for patterns is the easiest way to exert control over our environment. But the fallacy is this — the future is uncertain by nature. We can never know how the parameters, constraints, or opportunities can change moving forward. Traditional marketing methodology misses this, leading to stale calcified systems, diluted messaging, & a never-ending stream of copycats (see: the many offshoots of Dollar Shave Club’s 1st viral commercial). This principle constantly exposes legacy companies to disruption by upstarts but also goes hand-in-hand with another closely held principle.
Risk-Aversion
Established companies have more to lose. More eyes watching means a misstep can prove extremely costly. The goals shifts to preserving existing market share & established positions, & the appetite for innovation & risk greatly decreases. These two principles are also closely integrated with the third.
Prescriptive Consumer Relationship
“You NEED this.” The traditional marketing relationship is quite one-sided. The company relies on its historical data and/or what’s been successful in the market to prescribe a solution to consumer problems & pain points. While most companies perform some sort of market research, it’s usually topical — and serves to validate existing opinions or goals rather than embarking on a process of discovery.
Process
These foundational principles create a process of campaign & strategy development that doesn’t allow for evolving iteration. Marketers employ a waterfall process, or as I like to call it — the spray & pray. All resources are committed against a single, or core group of strategies/campaign angles to achieve the final goal on one (or a few attempts). We see this in action through many of the legacy forms of marketing: expensive billboards, TV/Radio commercials, & celebrity endorsements. This approach can be wildly successful if the assumptions are correct, disastrously wasteful if wrong.
Growth Science Marketing
Growth scientists, on the other hand, play by a completely different set of rules. Rather than focus solely on the Top of the Funnel, we’re willing to play with any section of the funnel that could potentially lead to growth. The prioritization of where to start is a risk, resource, & reward calculation (which we’ll detail later). The growth scientists’ methodology closely follows that of The Lean Startup, beginning with a single assumption.
‘You don’t really know what customers want.’
In other words, rather than harboring an aversion to risk, growth scientists fear building products & services based on untested hypotheses. This aversion to untested assumptions gives way to a very regimented disciplined method of uncovering audiences, developing products, & building campaigns. The process is very similar to the scientific method employed by researchers to investigate claims — hence the name Growth Scientist. This approach is successful because it relies heavily on testing hypotheses & experimentation, rather than investing time, money & resources upfront with an unknown probability of returns.
Process
Rather than assuming & prescribing a solution the company believes the customer wants, growth scientists first evaluate the current state of the company, identify a (reasonable) final goal, and define a hypothesis on how to achieve said goal. Brainstorming the fastest & most efficient way to test the hypothesis is next, followed by designing an experiment to validate/invalidate the hypothesis. The final steps involve running lots of experiments as quickly as possible. Each successful (or failed) experiment offers an opportunity for incremental improvement in the learnings of the previous experiment. With this method, the resources expended are put to better use, as even failed experiments carry insights to the next — and many have far-reaching effects outside of the marketing department. These learnings help build a bank of information that becomes useful for each subsequent quarter, offering valuable data about the business’s optimal targets, customers, channels, messaging & processes.
Which makes more sense for you?
To be honest, there’s a place for both approaches, but which is more effective is entirely dependent on the business. While most of the references in this exploration may seem to split the approaches by business size (legacy/incumbent vs. startup), it’s not the ideal proxy. I prefer to evaluate the overall maturity of a business when deciding on an approach. The following questions may help narrow down which might work better for your business.
- How well does the company/brand understand its current (or ideal) customers?
- Are you relying on demographic data only? Or do you have an idea of your customers’ psychographic & behavioral profiles as well?
- Is this data specific to the business? How heavily is industry, or category data being used?
- What do you have available resource-wise?
- How many people can you hire? And what can you hire for? (The traditional approach allows for more specificity, while the growth method maps better to wearing ‘multiple hats’).
- How tight is your overall budget? Can you afford to lose a substantial chunk on a single failed campaign or strategy?
- How well is your business optimized?
- Is there a bank of customers/previous learnings to lean on?
- Do you have a strong understanding of all the steps of your funnel & which potential paths to revenue are most influential?
- Are you meeting or exceeding industry benchmarks for each point of conversion in your funnel?
An honest self-reflection of your business in this way may provide insights into what you can afford (& what you can afford to lose), helping you decide which approach may be more successful for your particular business. What do you think will work best?
Jordan Lemmons is a creative, tenacious, autodidact bursting with passion & curiosity. I thrive on illustrating the humanity of brands through digital storytelling. Empathy, empowerment, & developing lasting connections are my organic toolset. This story is one of a series detailing knowledge gained from the 12–week exploration of Growth Marketing Minidegree, offered by the CXL Institute.
