[arkades]

When I first heard about growth hacking back in the day, as distinct from typical marketing, it was defined as engineering the product itself to propagate to new users. The “classic” example at the time was building social features into programs - Eg, spotify’s social integration.

Thing is, to the best of my knowledge, it (a) never really grew to anything beyond social integration, and (b) was soon expanded in scope to just mean “all marketing by people who wish they were in Silicon Valley,” and subsequently to “all marketing.”

But it had a real definition behind it at some point.

[philipodonnell]

I agree. Growth hacking was putting features into the product so that use of the product would inherently serve as influencer marketing and social signaling by its very nature. Think 'ask your friends for goods' from early Farmville that was required to play at a high level, the first action when joining LinkedIn being to invite your other professional contacts to LinkedIn, even way back to the "free email with Hotmail" signature watermarks so everyone receiving your email learned about Hotmail. This was considered novel because it provided a mechanism for truly rapid growth for companies with plenty of active users but very little or no incremental revenue to justify the advertising spend to acquire them. The idea was how to do marketing without paying for advertising, and what did we do to every problem in the 2000's: hack it!

Now its just any new or novel marketing idea from anywhere if the returns are superior to traditional marketing, which is fine, but what is the term now for products with growth features built in?

[davemel37]

Marketing is a dirty word to technoligsts. It implies the product needs manipulation to gain adoption... growth hacking strategies have been used by direct response marketers for over 100 years... while it originally was about piggybacking off an existing network of users and merged into data driven lean startupy tactics and eventually spread to all types of marketing...its intent was always the same...to give a new cool word to technologists so they dont have to feel dirty about doing marketing...

The truth is, everything that touches a prospect or customer is marketing. Treating your employees well is marketing. Your product is marketing. You are marketing...everything that impacts a decision to buy, even indirectly, is marketing...

It never was a dirty word...but as a marketer, I consider growth hacking to be a dirty word nowadays :(