Growth hacks in marketing & advertising. Part 2.

By Gonzalo López Martí  – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• Loosely defined, “growth hacking” is the constant tweaking of a product and its marketing to find the sweet spot of maximum user engagement with minimum friction.
• By definition, it is a never-ending process.
• Life in Beta mode.
• Perpetual AB testing.
• The premise being that there always is room for improvement.
• The presumption that perfection is impossible.
• Remember the good old “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”.
• Well, for a growth hacker, nothing is not broke and nothing doesn’t need fixing.
• Growth hacks are supposed to be based on the meticulous crunch of reams and reams of data.
• A dispassionate, bias-free, decision-making process.
• With a heavy dose of throwing spaghetti to the wall to see what sticks.
• Naturally, the “growth hacking” belief system has loads of worshippers in the tech world.
• Did I say worshippers?
• I meant Jihadists.
• In the corridors of Silicon Valley, growth hacking is an outright cult, a religion.
• Up there with Scientology, Yoga and gluten-intolerance.
• Have you noticed that pretty much every single time you download an upgrade of an app to your mobile phone the logo changes?
• Some very successful Valley companies, such as Instagram or Uber, seem to have no qualms at giving their logos a periodical facelift.
• At breakneck speed, sometimes once a month.
• You are beholding a branding growth hack.
• Google, as we discussed last week in the first installment of this column, changes its logo every single friggin’ day.
• They call it the Google doodle: https://www.google.com/doodles/
• For some reason, so-called legacy brands are terrified of hurried rebranding roll-outs.
• Naturally, it ain’t easy to change your logo when your business model is based on cranking out billions of aluminum cans, glass and PET containers per month.
• Granted, it is plenty complicated to change your packaging when doing so requires you to retrofit thousands of independently owned & operated bottling plants across the planet.
• New Coke anyone?
• Yeah, Roberto Goizueta, the legendary Cuban CEO who spearheaded de new Coke fiasco, got burned big time.
• Yet nobody can accuse him of not having a pair of cojones de size of bowling balls.
• If Mr Goizueta were in business today, would he be working for a stodgy CPG manufacturer &/or legacy marketer?
• Or would he be running a revolutionary, growth hack-obsessed start-up in Silicon Valley?
• In the 80s, when everybody else was gambling and snorting blow in Wall Street -including the POTUS- Mr. Goizueta was Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk rolled into one.
• A growth hacker avant la lettre.
• To be continued next week.

To read the first installment of this column CLICK HERE.