6 ms·

Examples of marketing tactics

172 points by vinnyglennon 9y ago

paulcole 9y ago
One of my favorites that's missing from here is the Just Mayo story: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-04/food-startup-ran-undercover-project-to-buy-up-its-own-products https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-04/food-star... Clearly unethical and maybe broke a few laws but who ever said that growth hacking was a game where you always keep your hands clean?
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  > Clearly unethical and maybe broke a few laws > but who ever said that growth hacking was a game where you always keep your hands clean? This is called fraud.
  - ggg9990 9y ago
    Would it have been fraud if they disclosed it to the investors? Ie is going into a store and buying your product to create an illusion of demand, by itself a criminal fraud?
    - troydavis 9y ago
      No. It might have violated their contracts with retailers, but any recourse from that would have been civil, not criminal. An interesting question is how long it’s material for. Clearly it’s material while it’s a meaningful portion of their total revenue or per-store sales. There’s an argument that buying your own product is material long after real revenue has grown, though, because it’s likely to have an impact if publicly discovered. Basically it becomes a skeleton in the closet, and as long as that skeleton is (a) known to the company and (b) newsworthy (and thus likely to impact the company’s perception and valuation), there’s an least an argument it still needs to be disclosed.
  - paulcole 9y ago
    Uber made the article and it’s not like they’re known for washing their hands in Ivory liquid.
- airstrike 9y ago
  The only thing more egregious than the fraud they committed was inventing vegan mayo to begin with...
  - jorgen123 9y ago
    I often agree with the sentiment, but not in this case. I actually like it better than the mayo I used to eat. I cannot wait for their test tube chicken.. (https://www.justforall.com/en-us/stories/clean-meat https://www.justforall.com/en-us/stories/clean-meat)
    - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
      I agree. I'm not even vegetarian buy I eat their mayo just because it tastes better. And because they paid me to make this comment.
c1utch1 9y ago
I'm really tired of the phrase growth hacking.
- zachruss92 9y ago
  Agreed. While the tactics are great and undoubtedly effective it should be classified as a lesser used word these days - Marketing.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    I think you might be confused. 1) Marketing is far more popular today as it was a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago etc. Especially with the rise of SaaS tooling there has been a lot of innovation and interesting work coming out of this space. And let’s not forget influencer and content marketing both of which are relatively new concepts. 2) Growth hacking is not just about marketing. It is a cross functional system bringing in expertise from engineering, data science, sales, marketing, finance etc. It isn’t specificaly a marketing activity but could be growth hacking against a range of business metrics.
    - CharlesW 9y ago
      > Marketing is far more popular today as it was a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago etc. Although it might seem that way[1], I'm curious what you'd point me at to persuade me that that's true.[2] > It isn’t specificaly a marketing activity… By most definitions (and regardless of title), marketing is anything associated with buying and selling a product or service. It's a pretty wide net. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ... [2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0g4gr https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
      - threeseed 9y ago
        Growth hacking is predominately about online businesses. And it's a pretty solid fact that there are more of those every year than in the preceding year. And not sure what you mean here. Growth hacking is not just about marketing. There are plenty of growth hacking initiatives for improving financial or business metrics e.g. employee retention. Might want to read the book about Growth Hacking to understand the discipline and why it is getting more and more popular. It actually isn't just some lame name to describe a few marketing tricks.
colbyh 9y ago
I understand that the term "growth hack" isn't well defined but still - most of these are just old school marketing techniques used by tech cos. A few novel ideas worth learning from but that's about it.
- threeseed 9y ago
  Read the book Growth Hacking which is quite clear about what the definition is. The idea is to have a cross functional team focus on a specific metric eg. user engagement or churn. And then rapidly prototype and experiment with different techniques to drive the metric in the right direction. It is just a new name for a combination of existing practices. But then again so is Agile and it changed the way software companies worked.
  - gk1 9y ago
    Even by that definition, this list doesn't make sense. There was no "cross-functional team focus[ing] on a specific metric" for the ice-bucket challenge. Cash incentives (PayPal example) have been around for decades—that's not a growth hack. This is a list of marketing strategies and tactics that happened to work for these particular companies/individuals.
    - dang 9y ago
      Ok, we've put marketing tactics in the title above.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      "Growth hacking" was always, since the very inception of a term, just rebranding of "marketing" in a way that makes it sound cooler. It's just a purified buzzword. In the tech space, having yourself called "growth hacker" was seen as more cool than "marketer".
      - threeseed 9y ago
        I know dozens of growth hackers and their skills are simply different to traditional digital marketers. It is far more experimental, technical and cross functional. And it will continue to evolve into its own space in the future. People who think growth hacking = marketing are just as clueless as those who think influencer marketing = Instagram. It's far more involved than that.
milesward 9y ago
Great growth hack my grandfather did, inspires me still: He opens a restaurant, on a bet, against a competing restaurateur, that he can succeed in an awful location with no signage or parking. On opening night, he hands a wad of money to my Dad and his adorable girlfriend, instructs them to dress nice, take a cab to the airport, tip, and rave about the dinner. upon arriving at the airport, get another taxi, tip, inform them that you've just flown in from SanFran and have heard the food at the 13 Coins is divine and to take them there post haste :) He won the bet.
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  13 coins in Seattle?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- cf498 9y ago
  If I recall correctly, participants of Egypts Arab spring mentioned the same tactic to spread the information about the location of upcoming demonstrations. A few people took cab after cab and kept mentioning that a protest will take place that evening in place xyz. In a few hours the information had spread through the city.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    We need open mob HTTP routers that decorate all requests with X-ANARCHY: <date> <time> <gps>
DisruptiveDave 9y ago
I feel like I'm in 2012 again.
pc86 9y ago
Who thought webpages giving you notifications was a good idea?
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  There are plenty of legitimate use cases - calendar apps, issue trackers, online games, news sites. They just tend to be stupidly implemented. If I'm a first-time visitor to your news site, and I haven't even read the article yet, there's about a 0.00% chance I'll allow notifications. Why they don't set a cookie and prompt only once you're a repeat visitor for a while is beyond me.
  - guitarbill 9y ago
    It's not great when the notification box is styled like native UI to make it seem more legitimate, although it is nice that the page doesn't just flat out request notification permissions.
  - hyder_m29 9y ago
    > Why they don't set a cookie and prompt only once you're a repeat visitor for a while is beyond me. Most of them don't care. Browsers ought to require a user action to trigger a notification request. I vaguely that being the case before, not sure where things changed.
CM30 9y ago
A few comments on these examples: Buffer: > The company grew its user base from 0 to 100,000, largely through the impact of guest blogs on third party sites, written by founder Leo Widrich. Was a good idea in the olden days, works a lot less now that Google has started cracking down on spammy guest blogging practices. Facebook: > To counter such resistance, Facebook has progressively turned off the message facility on its own app and telling mobile users they must migrate to Messenger. The result is a rapid growth curve to underpin the Facebook messaging masterplan. This is certainly 'effective', but it really, really annoys users, and will probably not work as well for a company with decent competitors. Network effects and being a near monopoly helps Facebook get away with this stuff, but if your small service tries it... well good luck there. TripAdvisor: > For instance, Tripadvisor encourages hotels to publicise good reviews by displaying badges. This is good for the hotels in question, but the badges also link traffic back to Tripadvisor and make Google rank that hotels reviews higher in their own search results. Ah, the old 'have people display a widget that links back to your site' trick. It's an okay strategy if your reputation is somewhat good or you got in early, but Google has worked to discourage such things in recent years too. https://searchengineland.com/google-reminds-webmasters-widget-links-webmaster-guidelines-258393 https://searchengineland.com/google-reminds-webmasters-widge... Pokemon GO: > There was no advertising for Pokemon Go and no explanation of how the game actually worked. All the maker Niantic did was tweet that it was available. This was also why the game died out so quickly too. Niantic was terrible at communication, and spent weeks seemingly doing nothing to address issues people had with the game. No comments online, no social media posts, nothing about updates with features people were looking forward to... The result was a huge die off, with things only recovering a bit when they actually opened up and spoke to their customers again. Either way, the advice is simple: Remember that what works for a large company or certain brand may not work for you (or others), that a lot of tactics used in the past have been disincentivised after SEO abuse and that your marketing trickery may be your downfall if you don't realise when a change in tact is needed afterwards.

172 points by vinnyglennon 9y ago

One of my favorites that's missing from here is the Just Mayo story: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-04/food-startup-ran-undercover-project-to-buy-up-its-own-products https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-04/food-star... Clearly unethical and maybe broke a few laws but who ever said that growth hacking was a game where you always keep your hands clean?

toomuchtodo 9y ago
> Clearly unethical and maybe broke a few laws > but who ever said that growth hacking was a game where you always keep your hands clean? This is called fraud.
- ggg9990 9y ago
  Would it have been fraud if they disclosed it to the investors? Ie is going into a store and buying your product to create an illusion of demand, by itself a criminal fraud?
  - troydavis 9y ago
    No. It might have violated their contracts with retailers, but any recourse from that would have been civil, not criminal. An interesting question is how long it’s material for. Clearly it’s material while it’s a meaningful portion of their total revenue or per-store sales. There’s an argument that buying your own product is material long after real revenue has grown, though, because it’s likely to have an impact if publicly discovered. Basically it becomes a skeleton in the closet, and as long as that skeleton is (a) known to the company and (b) newsworthy (and thus likely to impact the company’s perception and valuation), there’s an least an argument it still needs to be disclosed.
- paulcole 9y ago
  Uber made the article and it’s not like they’re known for washing their hands in Ivory liquid.
airstrike 9y ago
The only thing more egregious than the fraud they committed was inventing vegan mayo to begin with...
- jorgen123 9y ago
  I often agree with the sentiment, but not in this case. I actually like it better than the mayo I used to eat. I cannot wait for their test tube chicken.. (https://www.justforall.com/en-us/stories/clean-meat https://www.justforall.com/en-us/stories/clean-meat)
  - ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    I agree. I'm not even vegetarian buy I eat their mayo just because it tastes better. And because they paid me to make this comment.

c1utch1 9y ago

I'm really tired of the phrase growth hacking.

zachruss92 9y ago
Agreed. While the tactics are great and undoubtedly effective it should be classified as a lesser used word these days - Marketing.
- threeseed 9y ago
  I think you might be confused. 1) Marketing is far more popular today as it was a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago etc. Especially with the rise of SaaS tooling there has been a lot of innovation and interesting work coming out of this space. And let’s not forget influencer and content marketing both of which are relatively new concepts. 2) Growth hacking is not just about marketing. It is a cross functional system bringing in expertise from engineering, data science, sales, marketing, finance etc. It isn’t specificaly a marketing activity but could be growth hacking against a range of business metrics.
  - CharlesW 9y ago
    > Marketing is far more popular today as it was a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago etc. Although it might seem that way[1], I'm curious what you'd point me at to persuade me that that's true.[2] > It isn’t specificaly a marketing activity… By most definitions (and regardless of title), marketing is anything associated with buying and selling a product or service. It's a pretty wide net. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ... [2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0g4gr https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
    - threeseed 9y ago
      Growth hacking is predominately about online businesses. And it's a pretty solid fact that there are more of those every year than in the preceding year. And not sure what you mean here. Growth hacking is not just about marketing. There are plenty of growth hacking initiatives for improving financial or business metrics e.g. employee retention. Might want to read the book about Growth Hacking to understand the discipline and why it is getting more and more popular. It actually isn't just some lame name to describe a few marketing tricks.

colbyh 9y ago

I understand that the term "growth hack" isn't well defined but still - most of these are just old school marketing techniques used by tech cos. A few novel ideas worth learning from but that's about it.

threeseed 9y ago
Read the book Growth Hacking which is quite clear about what the definition is. The idea is to have a cross functional team focus on a specific metric eg. user engagement or churn. And then rapidly prototype and experiment with different techniques to drive the metric in the right direction. It is just a new name for a combination of existing practices. But then again so is Agile and it changed the way software companies worked.
- gk1 9y ago
  Even by that definition, this list doesn't make sense. There was no "cross-functional team focus[ing] on a specific metric" for the ice-bucket challenge. Cash incentives (PayPal example) have been around for decades—that's not a growth hack. This is a list of marketing strategies and tactics that happened to work for these particular companies/individuals.
  - dang 9y ago
    Ok, we've put marketing tactics in the title above.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    "Growth hacking" was always, since the very inception of a term, just rebranding of "marketing" in a way that makes it sound cooler. It's just a purified buzzword. In the tech space, having yourself called "growth hacker" was seen as more cool than "marketer".
    - threeseed 9y ago
      I know dozens of growth hackers and their skills are simply different to traditional digital marketers. It is far more experimental, technical and cross functional. And it will continue to evolve into its own space in the future. People who think growth hacking = marketing are just as clueless as those who think influencer marketing = Instagram. It's far more involved than that.

milesward 9y ago

Great growth hack my grandfather did, inspires me still: He opens a restaurant, on a bet, against a competing restaurateur, that he can succeed in an awful location with no signage or parking. On opening night, he hands a wad of money to my Dad and his adorable girlfriend, instructs them to dress nice, take a cab to the airport, tip, and rave about the dinner. upon arriving at the airport, get another taxi, tip, inform them that you've just flown in from SanFran and have heard the food at the 13 Coins is divine and to take them there post haste :) He won the bet.

aaronbrethorst 9y ago
13 coins in Seattle?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
cf498 9y ago
If I recall correctly, participants of Egypts Arab spring mentioned the same tactic to spread the information about the location of upcoming demonstrations. A few people took cab after cab and kept mentioning that a protest will take place that evening in place xyz. In a few hours the information had spread through the city.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  We need open mob HTTP routers that decorate all requests with X-ANARCHY: <date> <time> <gps>

DisruptiveDave 9y ago

I feel like I'm in 2012 again.

pc86 9y ago

Who thought webpages giving you notifications was a good idea?

ceejayoz 9y ago
There are plenty of legitimate use cases - calendar apps, issue trackers, online games, news sites. They just tend to be stupidly implemented. If I'm a first-time visitor to your news site, and I haven't even read the article yet, there's about a 0.00% chance I'll allow notifications. Why they don't set a cookie and prompt only once you're a repeat visitor for a while is beyond me.
- guitarbill 9y ago
  It's not great when the notification box is styled like native UI to make it seem more legitimate, although it is nice that the page doesn't just flat out request notification permissions.
- hyder_m29 9y ago
  > Why they don't set a cookie and prompt only once you're a repeat visitor for a while is beyond me. Most of them don't care. Browsers ought to require a user action to trigger a notification request. I vaguely that being the case before, not sure where things changed.

CM30 9y ago

A few comments on these examples: Buffer: > The company grew its user base from 0 to 100,000, largely through the impact of guest blogs on third party sites, written by founder Leo Widrich. Was a good idea in the olden days, works a lot less now that Google has started cracking down on spammy guest blogging practices. Facebook: > To counter such resistance, Facebook has progressively turned off the message facility on its own app and telling mobile users they must migrate to Messenger. The result is a rapid growth curve to underpin the Facebook messaging masterplan. This is certainly 'effective', but it really, really annoys users, and will probably not work as well for a company with decent competitors. Network effects and being a near monopoly helps Facebook get away with this stuff, but if your small service tries it... well good luck there. TripAdvisor: > For instance, Tripadvisor encourages hotels to publicise good reviews by displaying badges. This is good for the hotels in question, but the badges also link traffic back to Tripadvisor and make Google rank that hotels reviews higher in their own search results. Ah, the old 'have people display a widget that links back to your site' trick. It's an okay strategy if your reputation is somewhat good or you got in early, but Google has worked to discourage such things in recent years too. https://searchengineland.com/google-reminds-webmasters-widget-links-webmaster-guidelines-258393 https://searchengineland.com/google-reminds-webmasters-widge... Pokemon GO: > There was no advertising for Pokemon Go and no explanation of how the game actually worked. All the maker Niantic did was tweet that it was available. This was also why the game died out so quickly too. Niantic was terrible at communication, and spent weeks seemingly doing nothing to address issues people had with the game. No comments online, no social media posts, nothing about updates with features people were looking forward to... The result was a huge die off, with things only recovering a bit when they actually opened up and spoke to their customers again. Either way, the advice is simple: Remember that what works for a large company or certain brand may not work for you (or others), that a lot of tactics used in the past have been disincentivised after SEO abuse and that your marketing trickery may be your downfall if you don't realise when a change in tact is needed afterwards.