GROWTHHACKINGHow Hackers and Psychologists are Upending

a $400 Billion Industry for Fun and Profit

Growth hacking is what advertising would be like if it was invented today. It’s not an ad campaign that exists in a vacuum. In a way, it’s not even a single technique. More or less, it’s most accurately described as a hybrid form of two separate marketing techniques: guerrilla marketing and viral marketing.

Guerrilla marketing is marketing that exchanges sweat equity for big budgets. Viral marketing is marketing which exchanges great ideas for big budgets. Growth hacking uses many of the techniques that guerrilla and viral marketers use.

Numerous books have been written on each subject, like Jay Conrad Levinson’s 1984 book, Guerrilla Marketing, which is ultimately respected as the definitive tome on the subject. Viral marketing, while it does feature heavily in the last decade, is not that new, either. Its original story begins in 1976 with Richard Dawkins’ publication of The Selfish Gene. More recently, books by Malcom Gladwell, Seth Godin, and others have served to illuminate the processes involved.

As a hybrid discipline, growth hacking has received far less attention than either guerrilla or viral marketing. At this point, no formal guides have been published on the subject, and no one, to my knowledge, has defined a robust growth hacking strategy. While you can find bits and pieces around the Web, these are often one-trick ponies that work for some companies and not for others.

When you finish reading this white paper, we hope you will understand the fundamentals of growth hacking enough to be able to contribute your own ideas, experience and knowledge to the field.

THE 6 STEPPSHOW TO SCIENTIFICALLY ENGINEER VIRAL CONTENT

But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a spark plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, but who cares? The meme complexes of

Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong. -- Richard Dawkins

Understanding how we can scientifically engineer virality is crucial to developing a growth hacking strategy. Viral marketing is marketing intended to create and replicate memes, or simply, ideas. The holy grail of online marketing, the viral video, comes in a number of different flavors, from the wildly funny to the provocatively offensive or the profoundly sad. There are a few commonalities that viral content seems

to share. -- Contagious: Why Things Catch On

1. Social Currency2. Triggers3. Emotion4. Public5. Practical Value6. Stories

Social CurrencySocial currency is the idea that an individual’s social status is tied to the information he or she controls.

Information that increases a per-son’s uniqueness, especially in con-versation, is highly sought after and readily transmitted.

It’s possible to manufacture social currency. By creating novel and in-teresting content, we create the next trend that our consumers have to share with their friends.

Take a look at the “Will it Blend?” series of videos where blenders are used to blend everything from golf balls to iPhones. This is an exam-ple of social currency, because it doesn’t have any real value except making it seem like the viewer found a little treasure.

TriggersTriggers are words, phrases, or images closely tied to a message. For example, I say “melts in your mouth,” your mind immediately finishes the phrase and thinks of M&Ms. Manufacturing triggers is possible if we keep our message and trigger on top of mind and tip of tongue for an extended period of time. Of note are indirect trig-gers; I say peanut butter, and you think jelly, or more relevantly, I say “Gangnam Style” and, hopefully, you think pistachios. Brands should work to establish triggers using vi-ral content, so that when the trigger occurs, for example, my friend tells me about a cool new video that they just saw, I can say, “Oh, that re-minds me of this.” If you’ve created triggers like this, your content will be shared, too.

EmotionPeople share things they care about. Awe is the most heavily-shared emotion, but in general, any high-arousal emotion has a higher tendency for sharing. Sadness, on the other hand, prevents sharing. A good example of emotion that went viral is the KONY videos. We knew we couldn’t do anything to stop Kony, but we were moved to spread the word about him.

PublicContent that’s “built to show” is “built to grow.” If there’s any rea-son why a user might avoid sharing a piece of content, whether it’s lan-guage choice, content, or otherwise inappropriate, this can significantly impact sharing behavior on a large scale. On the other hand, move-ments that are naturally public, like Movember and the yellow LiveS-trong bracelet, tend to spread faster. You can start a viral craze with an idea that’s built to show.

Practical ValuePeople share “news you can use,” like useful, practical advice. Peo-ple enjoy helping others; it creates a stronger social bond between us by letting the other person know that we care. It’s important to note how we package our practical value advice: it should be tidbits, a para-graph or two at most, rather than a dissertation.

StoriesFinally, information travels under the guise of idle chatter. When your brand exists in a story that can’t be told without the brand, and when that story shares well in chatting, you’ve got a hit on your hands. For example, ask any 18-24 year old girl in your life how she would put together a superhero costume for Halloween. Without a doubt, her answer will include M.A.C.’s line of superhero makeup. You can’t tell the story of putting together a Wonder Woman costume without M.A.C. Is there a story in which your brand lives?

“Traditional marketing has always maintained that to market properly, you must invest money. Guerrilla marketing maintains that if you want to invest money, you can — but you

don’t have to if you are willing to invest time, energy, imagination, and information.

Traditional marketing is based on experience and judgment, which is a fancy way of say-ing “guesswork.” But guerrilla marketers cannot afford wrong guesses, so it is based as much as possible on psychology — laws of human behavior. For example, 90 percent of all purchase decisions are made in the unconscious mind, that inner deeper part of your brain. We now know a slam-dunk manner of accessing that unconscious mind: repetition. Think it over a moment, and you’ll begin to have an inkling of how the process of guerrilla

marketing works. Repetition is paramount.” - Guerrilla Marketing

GOING GUERRILLA

Guerrilla marketing is:

• Unconventional• Surprising• Original/Creative• Cheeky/Provocative• Cost-efficient• Flexible• Unusual/Atypical• Funny/Witty• Spectacular• Contagious

Guerrilla marketing can be implemented with diverse tools. Thereby, until now no uniform categorization of these instruments has prevailed. In the following the most important instruments of guerrilla marketing are structured in the three categories “infection guerrilla marketing”, “surprise guerrilla marketing” and “ambush marketing”. “Low budget guerrilla marketing” is a special case that can be subsumed to all other categories.

Low-budget guerrilla marketing is particularly suited for small and mid-sized companies that have only very limited budgets at their disposal. While infection guerrilla marketing attempts to make use of the opportunities especially provided by the new media, surprise guerrilla marketing concentrates on communications instruments that are employed in the public space or at special locations. Ambush marketing mainly occurs in the context of sporting events.

Low Budget Guerrilla MarketingFor small and mid-sized companies the emphasis of their communications policy is on the direct address of the (often regional) target group with creative, unusual and quirky ideas. Their aim is to underscore special features and “otherness”, thereby imbuing the company with a special significance in the eyes of consumers. This approach thrives primarily on a long-term, consistent commitment. Examples as to how awareness can be attained with cost-efficient low-budget marketing activities include eye-catching calling cards that project a clear and simple message or specially dressed-up promotion teams distributing original flyers and giveaways.

Infection Guerrilla Marketing (Viral Marketing)The infection strategy of viral marketing is similar to that of biological viruses: however, instead of the proliferation of pathogens, the focus here is on the exponential dissemination of a marketing message. By recommending a product or service to friends or acquaintances, consumers themselves become the advertising vehicles – whereby neither the transmitter nor the receiver of the message perceives the recommendation as advertising. The dissemination of the message can take place offline by word of mouth communication (mouth to mouth propaganda, buzz marketing) or online, virtually “from mouse to mouse.” For example, within only half a year Johnny Walker’s free PC game “Grouse Hunt” was downloaded from the Internet by a total of 40 million users, thus propelling the brand to immense awareness levels.

A further outstanding example of a viral marketing campaign is the marketing of the low-budget film “The Blair Witch Project”. The guerrilla campaign began as early as two years before the film hit the cinemas. The “Independent Film Channel” broadcast an unusual documentary about the disappearance of three students in the forests of the state of Maryland in the US. The television channel associated the disappearance with a spooky witch legend, which was reinforced by the statements of both the filmmakers Myrick and Sanchez during an interview. Their assertions that they were in possession of mysterious videotapes subsequently unleashed curiosity and sensationalist cravings among the public. With the design and launch of a website, the falsification of police documents and photographic evidence as well as accompanying reports

in high-circulation magazines (such as Time Magazine and Newsweek) they generated additional free PR. The website of the documentary film project recorded 100,000 hits after one week, a number that grew to over 2 million by the launch of the film. The public was infected by the Blair Witch virus and captivated.

Guerrilla MobileMobile marketing deals with the transmission of messages via mobile phones. Here, the jumping-off point for the use of guerrilla marketing is the fact that today the smartphone has advanced to the status of steady companion for many people in all life situations, thereby making the consumer approachable at any given time. By sending creative and humorous messages, for example via SMS, the objective is not only to have the advertising messages instantly read and absorbed, but ideally also immediately passed on to friends and acquaintances. The close association with viral marketing is obvious. As the options—with infrared, Bluetooth and MMS—steadily become more diversified, the significance of the mobile communications market for companies grows.In the run-up to the cinema release of the thriller “Hide and Seek” the film production company Twentieth Century Fox sent 100,000 young people a text message with the following content: “Why don’t you turn around…” By scrolling down the message, the initially baffled target persons were able to learn the solution: “You don’t see me! I am hiding. HIDE AND SEEK, the horror thriller now at the cinema.”

Ambient MarketingAmbient media is a collective term that aggregates all non-classical advertising media. Ambient media are placed and integrated in the direct living environment of consumers—are therefore not perceived as annoying, but rather often seen as likeable and original (e.g. postcards in trendy pubs, shower gel samples in locker rooms of fitness studios). Special hallmarks of ambient marketing are the radical nature, the speed and the creativity with which the public space is co-opted. Consumers are taken by surprise with advertising where they don’t anticipate it. The advertising message is transmitted in popular locations such as clubs, bus stops, the baggage conveyer at the airport or petrol pumps while refueling. Here, switching channels is not an option.

Public lavatories in particular have been discovered by the advertising industry as a place where “induced forced involvement”, thus a high-involvement situation can be generated and used for the placement of advertising messages.

Sensation MarketingSensation marketing is basically very similar to ambient marketing. The main difference being that as a general rule, sensation marketing activities are one-time occurrences, and not repeatable. The aim is to surprise and fascinate consumers and produce an “aha” or a “wow” effect. The terms “guerrilla sensation” and “ambient stunt” represent the unusual and spectacular.

Guerrilla sensation refers to a dynamic activity involving people. An example of this would be

the “Street Show” of Lee’s brand jeans that staged unannounced fashion shows on the streets of large cities.

On the other hand, the ambient stunt entails a spectacular static installation whose presentation is no less unconventional. The media-effective activities are conducted at strategic, high-traffic locations in order to generate a great deal of attention. This form of guerrilla marketing also makes use of multipliers such as media dissemination and viral effects in order to inform as broad a public as possible of the stunt. The auto rental company Sixt has been attracting attention for several years with flashy guerrilla sensation activities, and sports equipment maker Nike attempts to regularly surprise its target audience with sensation marketing.

Ambush MarketingFor many companies, it is major international sporting events (e.g. the Football World Cup or the Olympics) that constitute the ideal platform for the integration of their target group-specific marketing communication into an attractive sports environment. Sports event organizers therefore sell exclusive marketing rights for their events to official sponsors, who, in return, acquire exclusive options to utilize the event for their own advertising purposes. Ambush marketing is the method used by companies that do not actually hold marketing rights to an event, but still use their marketing activities in diverse ways to establish a connection to it.

Ambush marketing is the practice by companies of using their own marketing, particularly marketing communications activities, to give an impression of an association with the event to the event audience, although the companies in question have no legal or only underprivileged or non-exclusive marketing rights for this event sponsored by third parties. Thus, ambushers want to promote and sell products via an association with the event as official sponsors are allowed to do.

Now that we’ve discussed both constituent parts of growth hacking, viral and guerrilla market-ing, we can begin to offer suggestions how effective growth hacking pulls from each marketing discipline.

From the 6 STEPPS, we learned that viral content typically contains two or more assets from the following categories: social currency, triggers, emotion, public, practical value, and stories. Growth hackers must make a conscious decision to use several of these psychological factors while building a product. The most important for growth hacking is “public,” but successfully growth hacked products have used social currency, practical value, and stories to great effect.

Brand Yourself, a small startup out of New York City that provides DIY reputation management, socially engineered an increase from 25,000 to 90,000 users over the course of three days by implementing a combination of these techniques. First, they created a story. Their co-founder, Pete Kistler, shares a name with an ex-con. DUI news stories, drug busts, and images of mangled cars crowded the search results for his name. Then, they engineered practical value. The platform makes it easy for you to own your own name on the search engines. Finally, they made it natu-rally public. The nature of search engine optimization requires you to share links on your social networks and your personal website to your BrandYourself page.

Other companies successfully implement this kind of growth hacking, too. Dropbox’s ingenious referral program is a perfect example of growth hacking. If you invite a friend, and they sign up, you both get free space. On Skype, if you invite a friend, you can speak to each other for free.The thing that makes growth hacking hard to do is that no two companies will be successful at it by using the same techniques. It requires a deep understanding of the nature of guerrilla market-ing and virality, and, most importantly, some creativity.

SUPERCHARGE YOUR BUSINESS

WITH GROWTH HACKING

Sources CitedBerger, Jonah. “Contagious: Why Things Catch On.” 2013.Dawkins, Richard. “The Selfish Gene.” 1976.Levinson, Jay Conrad. “Guerrilla Marketing.” 1984.Nufer, Gerd. “Guerrilla Marketing – Innovative or Parasitic Marketing.” Modern Economy 4 (2013): 1-6.

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