Growth, the buzzword

Over the past few years, digital marketing has been reshaping itself, the way brands and customers interact but also some part of the technical jargon that we marketers were used to. Nothing new.

Any new era brings along a new semantic wave to mark the difference with the past.  So, a new entrepreneurial shift, like the one we have been experiencing since the rise of the start-up’s ecosystem, inevitably involves new narratives.

Nowadays we deal with concepts like “growth", "growth strategy" and "growth hacking" but few, even in the same industry, have clear what all of this is and most of all what is the difference with the old good notion of “marketing”. Though I define myself a growth strategist, I believe that the term “growth”, from a purely linguistic point of view, was not frankly the most appropriate semantic choice to describe that new way of intending marketing that came with lean entrepreneurship. A more accurate and more self-explanatory term could have been found, but because the buzz is now full on, we need to deal with it because that is the new semantic currency that can help us marketers identify ourselves and our skills-set.

The concept of growth is certainly not new and any human business recorded in history has always been naturally oriented towards growth, and way before the first industrial revolution. Growth is what companies from all decades have been pursuing and growth is what at a larger scale has made possible the existence of financial and trading markets. Growth is what any economy is bound to.

The confusion around this term, when used in the context of marketing, comes from the fact that it uses the “objective” ( growth) to define the process that actually leads to it. It is a bit as if we used the term "profit" to describe the activity of "financial trading".

In my view,  growth strategies should simply qualify as "lean marketing", because infact that is all it is. "Lean" defines clearly the new mindset for achieving growth. And "marketing", no matter how you may find it old-fashioned, already has in itself the connotation of process (“-ing”).

Here below, in an effort of disambiguation based on experience, I am trying to clarify the concepts of marketing and the one of growth. They are complementary. Marketing without growth has no reason to exist, and growth without a marketing assumption is a blind and random process.

Marketing is how you define your ideal customer and position your product across relevant audiences and within a certain landscape where competition, industry factors and other variables come into play. This aspect is typically captured by "lean canvas" and has to do with your business model.

Growth, is the dynamic facet of a marketing assumption that is behind a business model. 
If a X product offers a solution to a problem that is peculiar of a certain category of users/audiences/groups (marketing assumption), its growth will be the active process that:

• gradually transforms that solution into a validated market-fit
• scales that market-fit towards the objective of increasing the amount of customers, beyond early adopters, at the most profitable ROI and with the highest degree of retention over time against competition.

The set of strategies that are required to drive growth is actually what we call a growth strategy. These are business development strategies that turn a marketing assumption into a business that generates monetary value.

They are lean strategies because, compared to a traditional way of intending marketing, they:

• are based on continuous experimentation, testing and results measurement, which is conducted through tools and data analysis. 
• they are customer focused and prefer inbound attraction strategies.
• they are fostered by shorter R&D cycles and more agile teams.
• they prioritize low-cost tools and organic information, making great use, among others, of data that is available across social media, which are an unrivaled source of insights on customers.
• they focus on constant optimization and bottlenecks identification.

Because this continuous readjustment oriented mindset requires the use of data and low-cost utilities, the term “hacking" has been heavily involved yet often abused, in conjunction with growth.  Clearly “hacking” data is part of a wider methodology. A growth strategy cannot be reduced to the usage of a number of tools or tricks to mine data. Any data, no matter how well hackered it is,  is blind, out of a strategy.
A growth strategy is not a rigid plan that gets rolled out on the basis of an act of faith leveraging expensive budgets, but it is rather a lean plan that is able to re-adjust its direction, course, offer based on real customers’ demand. That is why a key metric of growth is the traction, the trend at which a start-up is able to generate increasing monetizable value in a steady way, within a certain timeframe.

Occasional outliers ( peaks of users acquired, sales generated, etc) do not qualify for valid growth indicators. It is the curve on the graph, not the single event that will be an indicator of a healthy growth that has also good chances to pay off if properly worked on.

In this framework, growth is not an optimistic leap where only the sky is the limit. In order to operate growth, the early detection of bottlenecks and their anticipation is crucial. While no number of conclusive best practices can guarantee growth, only one crucial bottleneck can jeopardize the entire growth trend.
Leveraging and harvesting growth means analyzing and proof-testing on a regular basis the market fit of a product to identify and remove those bottlenecks that will or may determine a downward trend at a later stage. They could be found in the product itself against the intended problem that it intends to address, or in the relation between product and initial audience, or in the relation between product and competition towards a certain audience. Without anticipating and fixing the bottleneck no real improvement can be done.

My idea of a growth strategist, ultimately, is not the one of a tool geek but more the one of a researcher, looking at a product with the same neutrality of an entomologist, when studying a butterfly. Understanding how and if the product serves an intended audience, making hypothesis for a shift in the UVP, looking for new customer channels to proof their responsiveness. Being empirical, with a goal in mind to measure.

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Camilla Bonanni is a growth strategist at Supernova.