Do Some People Believe “Growth Marketer” Is An Oxymoron?
Brand growth has always been the point of marketing.
Full disclosure: I’m aware that the following thoughts place me in great standing for the Marketing Curmudgeon of the Year award.
However, I feel I must give voice to my growing umbrage at the current lauding of the “growth” marketer and — even more annoying to me — “full-stack” marketer.
How do the people who bandy these terms about think marketers comported themselves before we prefaced the title “marketer” with these tech-bro adjectives?
I’ve worked in big global agencies, small boutique shops, been client-side, and consulted to CMOs around the world for decades. B2C, B2B, B2B2C: At no point did anyone feel the need to remind me or my team that the point of our labors was to grow the business. Never happened.
Similarly, at no time in my career have any of my mentors, bosses or clients felt compelled to advise me to consider the entirety of the prospect/consumer experience. Even the most half-assed of marketers understands the goal is to identify the group of humans with whom the brand will most deeply resonate, get the attention of this group, compel them to engage, address their barriers to purchase, and then encourage their loyalty and advocacy. Bonus points if the values and attitudes of this core strategic audience are brought to life in such a creatively engaging manner that increasingly larger consumer segments are invited in.
For the record: I’m no digital novice. I’m not wingeing about technology itself. In fact I may have been at the helm of one of the earliest examples of trying hard and failing in the digital realm. In my role as Partner at Ogilvy & Mather I led the agency team responsible for the marketing and on-line presentation of the 1997 chess match between the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, and Deep Blue, IBM’s supercomputer. We underestimated the audience. Or overestimated the technology. In any case, about five million people attempted to watch the match online. I say “attempted” because the host server crashed pretty early on in the match. So yeah, we “broke things”. In this case, the internet (and I was on the receiving end of some fairly unpleasant calls from the client.)
Honestly, I just find this all so silly.
If I don’t bill myself as a “Growth Marketer” but rather as a “Marketer” am I somehow communicating a “non-growth” stance? Some sort of ignorance about the point?
Throughout the ages, we marketers have had the same goals and been held to very similar macro KPIs. The toolboxes over time just look different. Sure there were fewer channels to consider in pre-internet days. Feedback was less immediate and nuanced. The cycles absolutely were slower. The job today moves more briskly often requiring 24/7 attention and response. (I’m looking at you, Twitter.)
Please note that I fully support the impulse to have marketing expertise touch all elements of a company’s business. Today this is defined as “full-stack marketing”. But I call it “responsible marketing” as those aforementioned barriers to purchase that marketers need to address are often related to product, customer experience, hiring practices, etc — because everything communicates!
When a client recently showed me their job description for a “Growth Marketer” position I smiled when I came to the part about “testing, experimenting, learning, and optimizing” — yes, this is what marketers have always done. The pre-digital alternative I guess would have been to pick a radio station, billboard, newspaper or magazine and run the same campaign ad nauseum (literally).
Of course marketers have always used data to drive decision-making, tried things, learned, and then tried new things. So can we please agree that the foundational aspects of the marketing role remain very much the same?
Or, they should. And this is where the purist in me starts to worry about where this is all going.
With so much of the focus on quick hits— randomness seemingly part of the point — is “growth hacking” happening at the expense of the foundational work of thinking creatively and strategically about the emotional and rational role a brand could meaningfully play in peoples’ lives? Even if it is possible to “growth hack” or A/B test one’s way into cultivating your HLV (high lifetime value) tribe — I’m very willing to bet it is a very inefficient path.
Which doesn’t feel like the behavior of a true “growth marketer”.