The Case Against Growth Hacking
Hint: there is enormous opportunity for the few people willing to go back and study the origins of where highly effective marketing really comes from
“Growth hacking” is the new, sexy, fun marketing thing everybody is obsessing about.
I just finished reading Ryan Holiday’s new book on the subject. I found it interesting, but mostly amusing. I’ll tell you why.
In a nutshell, growth hacking appears to be silicon valley engineers who realized the Big Dumb Corporation style of flushing money down the drain and calling it marketing doesn’t really work, especially if you’re a startup.
The “revolution” that is growth hacking is the idea of being accountable for the things you do in the name of marketing.
So you need to spend time doing smarter things. Find out exactly who your customer is, what he wants, and give it to them in an effective way. Get feedback. Improve your product. Make a product so good it sells itself.
For a lot of people, it’s an AMAZING concept. And in case you’re confused by the title of this article, I am all for growth hacking. It’s truly revolutionary for a lot of businesses. I’ve no beef with it.
But the mistake is in thinking this is anything new.
Direct marketers have been executing on strikingly similar ideas for a hundred years.
I’m frequently astonished in conversations I have with entrepreneurs, at how little they understand about direct marketing fundamentals. They think I’m a wizard or something.
Gary Halbert, who wrote the most successful direct mail letter of all time — he said something like “what you need to understand is that your marketing should be treated as a process, not an event. And it should be based on feedback.”
He said that before the internet was a thing.
My main conclusion from reading Ryan’s book was that growth hacking is the sexy new name for direct marketing.
I’m a direct marketer. I cut my teeth as a direct response copywriter. That’s the world I’m from.
And people from “my world” have been making fun of traditional marketing and advertising since, like, the ‘40s. Definitely since the ‘80s and ‘90s, when guys like Gary Halbert, John Carlton, Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham started teaching and holding the first big marketing seminars.
My advice to people who want to learn about marketing:
Growth hacking is great. But it isn’t new. And, I think you will be better served by studying those guys I just mentioned, than you will by hopping on the growth hacking bandwagon.
Why? Because, essentially, the growth hacking guys are reinventing and putting a new spin on the same concepts that direct marketers have been refining for a hundred years.
They’ve got this dialed. Dan Kennedy has been teaching marketing since the ‘80s, and still going strong. He’s called “the millionaire maker” for a very good reason. Direct marketing is based on tried and tested principles. Fundamental things that won’t go away no matter what happens to technology.
I’m not saying not to learn about growth hacking. It’s great. But don’t limit your thinking by pretending it’s a “revolutionary” thing. It isn’t. At least supplement your learning with some of the old school stuff.
Do you think you could learn something about selling stuff from a guy who wrote a one-page snail mail letter that profitably mailed 600 MILLION copies and generated more than 7 million paying customers?
And you know how everybody is talking about how you need to collect emails now? Kids like Dean Jackson, Jonathan Mizel and Perry Marshall were doing that in the ‘90s.
Most of the “growth hacking” stuff is very biased toward the tech startup world. You will get a very limited perspective if you only study that.
Most of the tactics and strategies that successful tech startups use to grow their profits today were invented by direct marketers 50 years ago.
Have you heard of the JPDK model? No? It’s named after Jeff Paul and Dan Kennedy, who invented it. It was one of the first ever systems for selling information to niche markets.
The classic JPDK marketer was someone like Joe Polish, who was a down and out carpet cleaner before he discovered direct marketing. He used direct marketing to triple his carpet cleaning business. Then he took all his successful campaigns, and became a “marketing guru” to other carpet cleaners.
Basically, you would take out a space ad in a trade journal with an offer for a free report. A real example from a marketer who sold marketing information to auto dealership owners: “How To Almost Double The Gross Profits On Every Vehicle You Sell!”
People request the report, and you got yourself a lead. You follow up with a series of direct mail letters, typically 3 letters sent out 2 weeks apart. The letters sell a complete marketing kit for carpet cleaners, or car dealerships, or dental clinics, or whatever the case may be. Everything from how-to information, to copy-and-paste-ready templates for ads.
The marketing kit would sell for $500 to $1000, and would likely include a snail mail, print newsletter subscription. On the back end of that, the marketing guru would run a couple of seminars every year, and offer coaching and consulting services to the most ambitious students.
Consider that sales process. Ad in the trade journal. Lead generation using a free report. Follow up by mail.
Isn’t that remarkably similar to how almost all sales processes online work today? Especially in more complex sales environments.
The first email-capture pages online were a direct application of this model to the internet. These same marketers just took what they used to do offline, and did it online.
A lot of these guys are still raking it in, online and off, and practically nobody in the tech world even know they exist.
Those that do gain a significant unfair advantage.
I am a marketing consultant and copywriter, I publish my ideas on absolutely everything at http://linusrylander.com
UPDATE: I got some good feedback on this piece, so I just put together this list of my top 10 direct marketing books…
