Ryan Holiday - Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

Nearly a year and a half ago, on what seemed like a normal day, I got in my car to leave my house, assuming it would be no different from any other workday. I had read the morning news, dealt with a few important employee issues over the phone, and confirmed lunch and drinks meetings for later in the day. I headed to the athletic cluba swanky, century-old private gym favored by downtown executives and swam and ran and then sat in the steam room to think.

As I entered the office around ten, I nodded to my assistant and sat down at my big desk and reviewed some papers that required my signature. There were ad designs to approve, invoices to process, proposals to review. A new product was launching and I had a press release to write. A stack of magazines had arrivedI handed them to an employee to catalog and organize for the press library.

My job: director of marketing at American Apparel. I had a half dozen employees working under me in my office. Right across the hall from us thousands of sewing machines were humming away, manned by the worlds most efficient garment workers. A few doors down was a photo studio where the very ads I would be placing were made.

Excepting the help of a few pieces of technology, like my computer and smartphone, my day had begun and would proceed exactly as it had for every other marketing executive for the last seventy-five years. Buy advertisements, plan events, pitch reporters, design creatives, approve promotions, and throw around terms like brand, CPM, awareness, earned media, top of mind, added value, and share of voice. That was the job; thats always been the job.

Im not saying Im Don Draper or Edward Bernays or anything, but the three of us could probably have swapped offices and routines with only a few adjustments. And I, along with everyone else in the business, found that to be pretty damn cool.

But that seemingly ordinary day was disrupted by an article. The headline stood out clearly amid the online noise, as though it had been lobbed directly at me: Growth Hacker Is the New VP [of] Marketing.

What?

I was a VP of marketing. I quite liked my job. I was good at it, too. Self-taught, self-made, I was, at twenty-five, helping to lead the efforts of a publicly traded company with 250 stores in twenty countries and over $600 million in revenue.

But the writer, Andrew Chen, an influential technologist and entrepreneur, didnt care about any of that. According to him, my colleagues and I would soon be out of a jobsomeone was waiting in the wings to replace us.

The new job title of Growth Hacker is integrating itself into Silicon Valleys culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of How do I get customers for my product? and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph....

... The entire marketing team is being disrupted. Rather than a VP of Marketing with a bunch of non-technical marketers reporting to them, instead growth hackers are engineers leading teams of engineers.

What the hell is a growth hacker? I thought. How could an engineer ever do my job?

But then I added up the combined valuation of the few companies Chen mentioned as case studiescompanies that barely existed a few years ago.

Dropbox

Zynga

Groupon

Instagram

Pinterest

Now worth billions and billions of dollars.

As Micah Baldwin, founder of Graphicly and a start-up mentor at TechStars and 500 Startups, explains In the absence of big budgets, start-ups learned how to hack the system to build their companies. Their hackingwhich occurred right on my watchhad rethought marketing from the ground up, with none of the baggage or old assumptions. And now, their shortcuts, innovations, and backdoor solutions fly in the face of everything weve been taught.

We all want to do more with less. For marketers and entrepreneurs, that paradox is practically our job description. Well, in this book, were going to look at how growth hackers have helped companies like Dropbox, Mailbox, Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Instagram, Mint, AppSumo, and StumbleUpon do and did so much with essentially nothing.

What stunned me most about those companies was that none of them were built with any of the skills that traditional marketers like myself had always considered special and most were built without the resources Id long considered essential. I couldnt name the marketerand definitely not the agencyresponsible for their success because there wasnt one. Growth hacking had made marketing irrelevant or at least completely rewritten its best practices.