Everything Is Marketing: How Growth Hackers Redefine The Game (opens in new tab)

Marketing ≠ Advertising.

While the article makes some nice (if broad) points, I wish people would stop conflating the disciplines of marketing and advertising. Advertising is a subset of marketing -- one of many. The two terms should not be used interchangeably, as this article does.

The article does a nice job of comparing "growth hacking" (which, by the description, does sound like something more akin to marketing) with traditional advertising, then attempts to make generalizations about the marketing field. Granted, this is a piece in Ad Age, which is focused on advertising.

It's just ironic that the piece asks us to think of marketing as more than just advertising, while proceeding to interchange the two terms.

I hate to be negative, but for an article on growth hackers, this spends very little time describing what growth hackers do (the role). Sure, it covers a couple of examples of how marketing is evolving into new mediums, but it doesn't tell how growth hackers play a part in that. For the violin example, is the author implying that growth hackers would come up with that better marketing strategy (help kids get into college)? For the Amazon example, is the author implying that growth hackers would come up with the policy of having all engineers write a press release of their product before building it? If so, then I don't really see how thats any different than traditional marketing / product development.

The article has a reference that I think does a much better job describing the role:

http://andrewchen.co/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an...

The article does a decent job of discussing growth hacking just after Sean Ellis wrote about it in 2010. You can find most substantial content on tactics and best practices else where.

I am glad the importance of growth is spreading to the mainstream but people need more meat these days.

Can someone explain to me exactly what a "growth hacker" is?

So far, it sounds to me like today's term for "marketer".

A good overview of "growth hacking" and lots of links, but you won't find much of the nuts and bolts in the article. Worth a read if you're new to the idea. Suggested further reading/watching:

Brian Doll (Github -- and you thought drink ups were just for fun?): http://emphaticsolutions.com/2012/06/22/marketing-for-geeks....

Paul Willard (Atlassian): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyZOGJHl_a0

There's lot more out there, but these two were good overviews for me, and included more detail on how to do it.

Taking it a step further, stop thinking of marketinhg as you just saying "buy, buy, buy" but rather engaging your customers. Creating memorable, lasting impressions and relationships can be an incredibly effective strategy for building and sustaining a group of customers.

See also: Unmarketing (http://www.amazon.com/UnMarketing-Stop-Marketing-Start-Engag...)