
Growth vs Marketing: The real difference no body is talking about
You go to a bar alone at your sophisticated best. You cast your eyes at the bar and see and you see a bunch of beautiful girls sitting there. You fixate your eyes on one of them hoping to ask her for a dance. You put your James Bond mojo on. You have it all figured out. You will make eye contact first, smile at her, compliment her with an well mannered gesture, go upto her, say the nicest pick up line, her eyes will twinkle and succumbing to your unmatched charm and courage she will finally say yes. Well, something like this. You get the gist.
While the whole universe is falling into place just for you but in your head, you see another guy going upto each girl at the bar, talking and then moving on to the next. To your disbelief in the course of the night he ends up dancing with 3 of them.
Well this is exactly how conventional marketing differs from today frantic growth notion. Needless to say, your approach is one of conventional marketing whereas the other guy’s is one of growth. So where did you go wrong?
Iterations v/s the perfect strategy
Growth is a data driven approach that is based on iterating and reiterating strategies to arrive at the end goal whereas conventional marketing is almost of rules that hopes to give you the desired result.
In our analogy, you had a preconceived strategy in place to ask that single girl for a dance. What you failed to factor in were the variables. Does she like james bond? How has her night been? Is she even interested in a dance? Or the primal question of whether she is even interested in guys? For your strategy to work, all these questions to go with your demeanour has to be completely in your favour, which in all reality gives you almost zero chances of success.
The other guy however did not waste time. He took his chances. Yes he did get rejected by a few. But iterated his pick up lines, learnt from his mistakes and observation and came out on top. Even if he had been rejected by all of the girls, he would go home knowing ten of his strategies don’t work, hence he will start working on his eleventh one. And with every success he can define new ways (customisation) to arrive at his success metric. Whereas if you are rejected, you go home with only one.
Marketing v/s growth: The part no one is ready to answer
Marketing={Conventional approaches, Perfect well chalked out strategies}
Growth={A/B tests, Technology, iterations, Marketing}

Growth is no magic wand. It is merely a different approach to marketing. An approach that has a success metric defined well above the 2x mark. An approach that relentless, using technology to test different strategies at a frantic pace and use data for the next. Growth is a more holistic approach at looking things with an unerring focus to the core value( north start metric) of the product. Yes some of the methods are uncanny and sometimes borderline unethical, but thats what it takes to grow your company at that frantic pace.

