Is Growth Marketing and Growth Hacking the Same Thing?

Peep Laja recently posted this question on LinkedIn and @mentioned me to request an answer. I wrote out the answer and then realized that it was way too long for a single reply on a LinkedIn thread. So I'm posting my full thoughts here and offering a briefer answer in the thread to his question.

Before I explain how I see the difference between growth marketing and growth hacking, I want to start by saying that I try not to get too caught up in semantics these days. Ultimately I care most about how to drive rapid, sustainable growth for great products that provide real value.

But regarding the question… To me, growth marketing is a synonym for performance marketing. Essentially performance marketing should have the direct goal of creating a measurable result for acquiring customers. It is generally focused on the top of the funnel. Growth hacking is also about driving measurable impact on customer growth, but it extends beyond the top of the funnel to include all of the levers of growth.

When I coined the term “growth hacking” I purposely avoided using the word marketing. The main reason is that marketing generally refers to both a department and a set of activities done by that department. Given that many of the levers of growth are controlled by departments with other names, I found that “marketing” causes these other groups to get a bit territorial. Engineers don’t want to be at the whim of marketers, product people don’t want us marketers junking up their UX with ugly CTAs, etc. Of course, if we think of marketing as the process by which you capture and grow your share of a market, then it should include most of the activities that would lead to growth (think 4 Ps). But the reality is that the term marketing comes with a lot of baggage (especially in tech). In my experience, breakout growth happens when you experiment across all growth levers and this requires close coordination between marketing, product, engineering, UX, data, design teams…. When you call something growth marketing, it leads many teams to add roles for growth product management, growth engineering, etc. This is OK as long as people are working effectively cross-functionally to experiment and accelerate value delivery (critical for sustainable growth). But for many companies, cross-functionally working to drive growth has been a huge challenge.

Of course “hacking” is pretty obnoxious as far as words go. But when I coined the term 10 years ago, hacking was generally associated with very creative programming. Facebook is still located at 1 Hacker Way and YCombinator was churning out unicorns driven by hacker founders. And even for non-technical people, LifeHacker was a very popular site about creative solutions to everyday problems. Maybe the term has run its course, but I don’t think that growth marketing is a good replacement.

But again, semantics are less important here than figuring out how to accelerate sustainable growth for truly great “must-have” products.