Technical jargon: What does "growth hacking" actually mean?

Around one million Christmas trees will soon be standing somewhere in Swiss living rooms. Although there are fewer and fewer of them, they are getting bigger and bigger. Growth hacking is not only the magic word in marketing departments at Christmas time. Because in addition to Christmas trees, sales figures, customer satisfaction, online marketing performance and start-ups are also said to be growing skyward at the moment. Only the Covid 19 numbers are supposed to finally stop doing that. But that's another story, albeit the most successful growth hacking of the year.

The word originates from the start-up scene, whose "Fast Company" postilion constantly presents new success stories of young companies that have achieved an incredible amount incredibly quickly. In the meantime, it has become a buzz word in the marketing departments of many companies. There is not a single presentation or workshop where the word is not mentioned.

Neither for the understanding of "growth" nor for that of "hacking" you need a particularly profound knowledge of English - but what the heck does the combination growth-hacking mean?

Achieve a lot unusually fast

The parents of this word are hackers, those people and programs, in other words, who unauthorizedly penetrate other computer systems by skillfully and repeatedly trying and applying various attack strategies. An example? No matter how large and expensive firewalls are built by IT security, if the drinks machine or the spider that stands in the meeting room is connected to the company network, unprotected intrusion by hackers is suddenly possible.

It's the same with growth hacking in marketing: it's the unusual paths and channels that lead into the stream of success. It's all about tinkering and fiddling, doing things that are actually meant for something else.

For start-ups this is easy, because they usually operate from this perspective and call it innovation, scalability and user connection. For old-school marketing and creative heads, it's significantly more difficult, because apart from their own pay curve, they don't know any scaling methods and are now trying to cover up their own inability to innovate with growth hacking demands. Growth hacking, however, demands a different mindset: one that has a lot to do with inner greatness and little to do with Christmas tree chopping.