You need to stop equating growth with marketing

Learning the difference can be key to maximising growth

I made a huge mistake by treating them as the same thing when I took the brand marketing team onboard under my management when I was in a Head of Growth role.

I thought I knew the difference, and it seemed harmless, giving us more resources to grow. But it was a terrible choice.

Here are all the details of my failure and what I’ve learned from it.

What went wrong

I made brand follow the growth process:

• Use the scoring system to prioritise

• Every idea had to be an experiment

• Every idea had to be measurable

• They had to focus on conversions

This meant the big, creative, hard-to-measure ideas were scored low and never got the opportunity to see the day of light… Oops.

I had a growing brand marketing team who had no room for creativity.

Also, with 80% of my team being marketers, I got focused on the top of the funnel more and more when we had fundamental issues to work on around product-market fit, pricing, and retention…. not typical marketing levers.

Growth actually started to slow down.

It taught me for all of my claims of knowing the difference between growth and marketing, I wasn’t practising what I preached. Growth was slowing down, and our best growth periods resulted from a strong boost in our engaged audience across Instagram and email, but that wasn’t growing with the approach we were taking.

Growth vs. Brand Marketing

Ensuring myself and the team understood the difference between the two areas was key to getting things back on track.

While both strategic, they cover different areas and are motivated by different KPIs:

Note that this does NOT mean that Brand doesn’t care about Growth KPIs or vice versa. But instead, Growth gives Brand the room to focus on long-term brand building and awareness.

What about marketing as a whole?

Brand is a key part of marketing. But it works differently from the performance part of marketing. So lumping it all together leads to a suboptimal process for Brand and to Product / other areas not being seen as growth.

Startups tend to operate using the below model. While product and price are covered by the Product team, and placement by the Ops team, brand, promotion and brand awareness fall under marketing.

Including product in the mix further complicates things. To learn about how product, marketing and growth interact, and to discover key ways to structure your growth team to account for this, check out my full article on Medium.

Recommendation

In every edition of Growth Waves, I also share a related book, individual or newsletter to check out related to the week's topic.

If you want to learn more about Growth vs Marketing and how to avoid my fatal error, check out this talk that I did with Experimentation Nation.

I run through the challenges I faced in integrating the two, and how I realigned for future success when looking to make a clearer distinction between them.

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So, I urge you all to please stop equating growth and marketing. They are fundamentally different, and that is a good thing.

It builds for a stronger organization, stronger processes, and faster growth when we understand them as separate (but related) fields.

Chat soon,

Daphne.