You Don't Have to Hack if You Know What You're Doing

A couple of weeks ago I was in a first conversation with a potential client and the phrase “growth hacking” came up. 

That should have been the red flag. I ignored it, sent the proposal and explained how I work. Evidence-based marketing. Commercial modelling. Forecastable growth rather than hopeful experimentation.

They didn’t want that. Which is fine. It’s their money.

But it surfaced something that needs saying plainly. 

A growth hacker is not the same thing as a trained marketer, and the outcomes are sure as shit not the same either.

If you’re a founder or CEO, this matters because you are allocating spend. If you’re a marketing lead, it matters because you are allocating credibility.

Marketing Is Not Vibes

There aren’t many industries where we’d swap trained expertise for someone trying things to see what sticks. 

We don’t hire building hackers, we hire architects. 

We don’t hire medical hackers, we hire doctors. 

We definitely don’t board a plane flown by someone who has played a flight simulator and feels confident.

Yet in marketing, we tolerate it.

Growth hacking, at its worst, is iteration without diagnosis. It is swapping copy, nudging bids, shifting images and gaming platforms while calling it strategy. 

That is not marketing. It is engineering around an algorithm.

Algorithms change. People do not change that quickly.

Marketing is about how people think, feel, decide and remember. Platforms are just delivery systems. When you mistake the vehicle for the mechanism, you end up optimising the wrong thing for all the wrong reasons.

Marketing Is About Markets

A trained marketer starts with the market, the people who are going to buy whatever you are selling. How decisions are made. What drives memory. How mental and physical availability work together. How share of voice relates to share of market. How budget influences your share of market over time.

These are not opinions. They are relationships established over decades of empirical research.

If you give me, or commission me to find, your turnover, category size, share of market and projected investment, I can build a reasoned forecast of growth. Not a fantasy spreadsheet, but a projection grounded in how markets actually behave. It’s not perfect science, but it is materially better than “let’s test some stuff and see what happens”.

The difference is understanding causation versus correlation. If you only look at platform metrics, you do not know why something worked. You just know that something happened. That is a dangerous way to spend serious money.

Short-Term Hacks Create Long-Term Stagnation

Growth hacking focuses only on what is immediately measurable. Click-through rates. Conversion tweaks. Funnel optimisation. All useful. In truth, none sufficient though.

You can optimise yourself into a seemingly successful corner and mistake it for growth, when in reality you are just extracting more value from existing demand. Eventually you plateau, because you haven’t created any new demand to replace what you have squeezed.

You’re left with the remnants of a pimple.

The truth is, and yes this has been empirically proven, that most of your market is not buying right now. At any given time, 95% are not searching, not clicking and not filling in your forms. If you only invest where intent is visible, you are competing aggressively for a small slice of current demand. That’s both expensive and doomed to failure.

Proper marketing builds mental availability in the 95% who are not in market yet, so that when they are, you are remembered and considered.

That’s not hackable. But it is how you grow a brand. Actual growth, long-term, not just a lucky spike.

It requires creativity, consistency, decent investment and a clear understanding of how memory structures are built over time. It requires patience, which is less sexy than a dashboard screenshot but massively more profitable.

Memorability Beats Novelty

During a recent Super Bowl, last year maybe or the year before, one of the crypto brands ran a bouncing QR code on screen. It was different and it got talked about. But how many people can tell you what the brand stood for or why it was meaningfully better? Or even which brand it was? 

I can’t without searching, and I can’t be arsed to do that.

Now compare that to narrative-driven advertising that builds distinctive assets over years. Characters, music, structure and tone that become encoded in memory. 

I’ve had “Birds Eye Potato Waffles. They’re waffly versatile” in my head this week, not because I’m in the market for waffles, but because it was built to stick. Because it was a great ad.

That’s not hacking the system. It’s understanding how emotion and memory combine to drive recognition and choice.

Founders: You Are Buying Growth, Not Activity

If you’re a founder CEO, here’s the commercial reality. You are not paying for performative experimentation. You’re allocating capital that should compound over time.

If the person you hire can’t explain how their activity links to revenue, how budget translates into share of market growth, what leading indicators matter and how short-term activation balances with long-term brand building, you are not buying strategy. You are buying hope.

Hope is not a growth plan.

Marketing Fam: Stop Shrinking the Function

For my marketing peers, if all we talk about is CPC, CAC and platform tweaks, we’re making our influence even smaller. Engineering matters. Measurement is critical. But without diagnosis and without an understanding of how markets grow, we risk reducing ourselves to technicians pressing buttons.

Growth hacking is seductive because it promises speed. Marketing effectiveness is powerful because it delivers real long-term business growth. 

They’re not the same thing, and we should stop pretending they are and pile onto anyone and everyone who claims they are.

So here is the better question. When someone says they want a growth hacker, ask whether they are looking for someone to game a system they don’t understand or someone who understands how markets actually work.

I’m not a growth hacker. Fuck you growth hackers.

I’m a marketer.

If you want someone to chase the latest platform tweak, I’m not your man. Sorry not sorry.

If you want to understand your market, forecast growth and build mental availability that increases share of market and revenue over time, then we should talk.

Because hacking might get you a spike.

Marketing builds you a business.

Right. The Obvious Questions Answered

Is growth hacking the same as marketing?

TLDR answer: no.

Growth hacking is a set of tactics, usually platform-specific, usually short-term, usually obsessed with optimisation. Marketing is a business function concerned with market diagnosis, demand creation, pricing, positioning, distribution and long-term revenue growth.

Growth hacking tweaks the engine.

Marketing helps you decide where you’re driving, why, and how much fuel you need to get there profitably.

Confusing the two is how you end up very busy and not a bigger player in the market.

Do we need a growth hacker or a trained marketing leader to drive business growth?

If you want predictable, compounding growth, you need a trained marketing leader.

Someone who can diagnose the market, model growth scenarios, link budget to share of market gains, balance short and long-term investment and align marketing with sales and commercial objectives.

A growth hacker can optimise within a system.

A marketing leader builds the system.

One squeezes demand.

The other creates it.

Why are we not growing even though we’re optimising conversion rates and performance channels?

Because you’re trying to extract more value from existing demand, not expanding the number of people who want to buy from you.

Conversion optimisation improves efficiency. It doesn’t automatically increase the size of your customer base. If your total pool of buyers is static, you can only optimise so far before you hit a ceiling.

You’ve most likely optimised yourself into a corner.

Put another way, you’re fishing harder in the same pond instead of digging a bigger one.

How do we connect marketing activity and budget to predictable revenue growth?

By starting with market fundamentals, not tactics.

Understand category size, your current share of market, your share of voice, brand awareness and buying cycles. From there you can model how increased investment, if used correctly, influences mental availability, recognition and ultimately share of market growth.

Set objectives in revenue terms first. Then reverse-engineer the level and type of activity required to get there.

Short-term activation converts in-market demand. Long-term brand building creates future demand.

Budget is not “what we can afford”.

Budget is “what level of growth we are targeting”.

If someone can’t explain how spend connects to share and how share connects to revenue, you are not looking at a growth plan. You are looking at activity.

Should we prioritise short-term performance optimisation or long-term brand building?

It’s not either or. It’s both, deliberately balanced.

The long AND the short of it.

Short-term performance drives immediate cashflow from the small percentage of the market currently in buying mode. Long-term brand building increases mental availability with the much larger percentage who will buy in future.

Over-index on performance and you plateau.

Over-index on brand without activation and you starve cashflow.

The job of grown-up marketing is to manage both at the same time.

Because hacking gets you a spike.

Proper marketing builds you a business.