Marketing is dead. Advertising is deader. Long live growth hacking? Part 3

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative Director
www.LopezMartiMiami.com/

Part 1 of this article CLICK HERE.

Part 2 of this article CLICK HERE.

• Many growth hacks are glorified, carefully orchestrated bait & switch maneuvers.
• Throw in a little word of mouth* and BINGO.
• To wit: for a number of years Netflix allowed and even encouraged its members to share their user names & passwords with friends and family.
• Five or even ten people simultaneously streaming from the same account was not unheard of.
• Grow, grow, grow at all costs.
• Get as many viewers on the hook as possible, no questions asked, no holds barred.
• Until one day the streaming behemoth abruptly terminated this oh-so generous policy.
• A dangerous move.
• The risk of seriously alienating its customer base was very high.
• In fact, the Los Gatos, California-based company did confront several weeks of subscriber churn, Wall Street acrimony and online trolling after the announcement.
• But management bit the bullet, weathered the storm and returned to growth shortly thereafter.
• The growth hack ultimately paid off.
• There’s massive migration of all sorts of businesses to a subscription-based revenue model for a reason.
• From software to streaming to cloud storage to razor blades to underwear.
• People are just too busy, lazy or distracted to unsubscribe.
• The fine line between inertia and loyalty.
• Speaking of which: airline milage membership clubs are, in a sense, growth hacks.
• A growth hack I really like? AB testing.
• (As much as Silicon Valley likes to claim they invented it, it’s been around for a while.)
• Hip Hop and electronic music use samples of old hits as a form of cognitive infection that lowers the threshold of familiarity and increases the earworm factor of a new song.
• Which is none other than an iteration of an old one: AB testing, music industry style.
• Madison Avenue tries every now and then to pull a growth hack.
• A former López Martí Miami client retained us once to launch a mobile phone with a factory built-in, pre-funded crypto currency wallet, the idea being that the phone would pay for itself, particularly through earnings obtained playing videogames (you’d be surprised at the amount of digital money an accomplished videogame player can earn in the virtual world).
• It wasn’t a massive success, but said client was able to sell the technology to a big Silicon Valley conglomerate for a decent price tag.
• Another Miami-based agency, David, created a TV spot for its client Burger King that triggered voice commanded devices at home to read out loud a Wikipedia description that had been deliberately edited to sing praises to the Whopper.
• More a publicity stunt to win awards** than an actual growth hack.
• Is emotional blackmail a growth hack?
• Why not.
• In the 70s and 80s, when Volvo was strongly positioned as the “safety first automaker”, the implication was clear: if you don’t drive a Volvo, you don’t love your family.
• Brilliant.
• Guilt trips have made Madison Avenue billions and Silicon Valley trillions.
• It is not kosher, however, to take advantage of basic human instincts or to game our lizard brain for the sake of growth hacking.
• Exploiting addictions is not nice.
• Pornography is not a growth hack.
• Make products that are useful, affordable, easy & pleasant to use.
• What was old is new again.
• The more things change the more they stay the same.

*Alson known as “network effect”
**Nothing against publicity stunts to win awards. Quite the opposite.