"Growth Marketing" is not the Solution
By his own definition, P.T. Barnum was a showman rather than a conman. The distinction was based on humbug, the use of exaggeration and falsification to make money; a hoax is fine if the audience feels they received value for it, and that stops it from being a scam. Barnum also realised that being transient helped humbug: circuses and museums travelling from one town to the next made it easier for him to carry on selling hoaxes as they were gone before any of them could be rumbled.
Humbug boils down to selling a promise, showing something that looks like it, and moving on before the illusion falls apart.
"Growth marketing" is a modern humbug. It promises a quick fix, delivers good numbers for a few months, and then inevitably declines; by that point the marketing support has jumped ship and moved on to do it to someone else. If you understand how marketing delivers sustainable, long-term holistic commercial impact, then you can see why it is an approach that is condemned to continuous failure fairly soon after it starts.
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The basic premise of marketing that directly supports growth (as an overall idea) is perfectly fine, and it is a perfectly decent way to approach marketing or structure a marketing programme if it is done properly. Properly being the operative word. If it is done in a way that supports holistic commercial performance, utilises a tactical mix that is relevant and appropriate to the business, and is set up to balance short- and long-term gains through an understanding of how marketing affects business mechanics, then it can provide excellent results for a business.
Over the past few years as a freelancer, I’ve come across a scenario again and again: a business bought into “growth marketing”, got burned by it, and now needs help tidying up the mess they've been left with. In almost every case it's the same pattern: great at the start, tailed off very quickly, and by the time the realised what was happening the growth marketer had left without any guidance or advice on how to fix the situation.
None of this is surprising. There is a responsible version of “growth marketing” done by competent marketers who understand marketing and how to apply it to good effect, but they are the minority working under the banner. The dominant version of “growth marketing” is usually out-the-box tactical frameworks that support a short-sighted philosophy that marketing’s only job is ‘revenue, right here, right now’. In many cases it has degraded to simply pumping large chunks of budget into paid media channels and churning out high quantities of low quality AI content marketing to (supposedly) ‘game’ SEO and AEO to cover the organic side.
The growth marketer left because they know that what they do is a hit-and-run job, an impressive but unsustainable up-front return followed by an inevitable drop; they leave because they know it's coming, don't know how prevent it, or why their approach makes the decline inevitable from the beginning. They know they need to get out before the finance people realise the trajectory the business has been put on, because they have no idea how to course correct. In the worst cases, they never had any intention of course correcting; they got their pay cheque and used the early numbers to get hired by the next business before the problems became apparent.
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WHY "GROWTH MARKETING" IS A PSEUDO-SPECIALISM
Marketing has a recurring problem: every few years a new set of misunderstandings and misinterpretations of good practice come together, become the trendy new thing, and spread throughout the discipline. With most marketers lacking training in marketing and unable to see why it is flawed, popularity is interpreted as proof of credibility and efficacy, and it becomes widely adopted as the latest magic bullet. They usually latch onto a business buzzword to imply a direct and immediate solution to the current zeitgeist business concern, add the buzzword as a prefix to create a job title, and then sell promises that won’t (and can’t) be delivered.
These are pseudo-specialisms: approaches to marketing based on misapplications of theory and practice that do more harm than good. Usually pseudo-specialisms are relatively harmless, often limited to cosmetic tinkering of tactical actions that only affect vanity metrics; but every so often a pseudo-specialism comes along that can (and does) damage businesses.
What hallmarks identify “growth marketing” as a pseudo-specialism?
One, it openly advertises its ignorance the discipline at a fundamental level. If you know what marketing is and you do it well, growth is a natural outcome. Be suspicious of anyone who reframes a basic expectation or a basic sign of competence as a ‘special’ skill or result. The prefix is completely redundant; the verb is implicit in the noun (if you understand the noun to begin with).
Two, it builds itself around a vague, nebulous, and broad term. This is always a red flag: it is a sleight of hand that allows marketers in specialisms that are losing credibility or status to rebrand themselves and sell their narrow expertise for higher pay under the guise of a general, overall marketing solution. The easiest way to become an ‘expert’ in something is to invent something to be an expert in; and the more ill-defined thing is, the easier it is for marketers to hide the skills and knowledge they need but don’t have to do it.
Three is its sudden appearance. Where were growth marketers ten years ago? If it was a legitimate specialism with years of evidence-based practice and proven fundamentals, it wouldn't have appeared out of nowhere, reactively, in the wake of a new bandwagon. The answer to the question is straightforward. Ten years ago, marketers generally knew enough about marketing to know that growth was a natural outcome if was done properly, so it didn't need to be singled out. Always be wary of buzzword-as-prefix specialisms that only started to appear when the buzzword they adopt as a prefix started to take off.
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WHY "GROWTH MARKETING" IS BUILT TO FAIL #1
It creates a dependency that forces resource onto diminishing returns.
As I've said in another article, growth marketing is an example of the business equivalent of taking Ozempic (or any other miracle weight loss drug). Initially the results are outstanding, very pleasing, and quite dramatic.
The problems come after that opening phase, when it becomes clear that the result are unsustainable. Just like growth marketing, when you understand how the approach works, you see the baked-in flaws that make it dangerous and impractical as a long-term solution, and impossible for it to provide a long-term benefit without doing severe damage.
Weight loss drugs work by being aggressive appetite suppressants, so they get you to lose weight through deliberate malnourishment. They are basically providing chemically-assisted starvation. They seem to be very effective in the beginning because this malnourishment is good for losing superficial body fat, and the aggressive calorie deficit helps it to fall off quickly. That's why Ozempic seems great in the beginning. You take a few injections, you drop weight quickly without having to do any exercise, and you feel better about yourself.
Good stuff...until you stop taking it. You've lost the weight you wanted to shift, so job done: ne need for those annoying injections any more. Without the appetite suppression, you start eating again, the weight starts to come back. What do you do? Back on the Ozempic again. Lose the weight, stop taking it. Put the weight back on again, start taking it, lose it again, stop taking it, put it back on again, start taking it again: the cycle continues. It has created an input-output dependency: in order to keep the weight odd, you have to keep putting the drugs in.
While these cycles are happening, two things are also quietly happening in the background.
On one hand, as more and more people become dependent on the drug, the pharmaceutical company will keep raising the price of it knowing they have a captive market; so you *pay* more and more just to maintain the same results.
On the other hand, the body builds up a tolerance to drugs that are regularly used, so it needs more and more of it to work; the issue is that there is a maximum dose of a drug that the body can take, so eventually you reach a point where even the maximum dose cannot maintain the results, and they will decline.
This is what growth marketing does to businesses. It creates an input-output dependency between channel spend and ROI; all the while, the cost of using that channel is going up, and the market is building a tolerance to the over-saturation of mediocre activity, making them less noticed and increasingly less effective. Eventually you hit the point where the maximum spend cannot continue to get the same ROI, and then on to the point where the spend outstrips the returns. That's why growth marketing inevitably ends with over-spending on ever-diminishing returns.
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WHY "GROWTH MARKETING" IS BUILT TO FAIL #2
It is a short-term solution designed for short-term spikes.
When you understand the marketing levers behind revenue and profit, how they interact and mutually benefit each other to produce both, and how to use marketing to continuously and sustainably build that mutual benefit, it is painfully obvious why “growth marketing” has an inevitable decline on a fairly predictable timescale. I’m not going to explain it here, as that will give the “growth marketing” grifters a script they can recite to trick more businesses; but I’ll be glad to explain it directly if you’re interested. If there’s enough demand
Growth Marketing's main problem is a myopic hyper-fixation on quick revenue. Profit isn't in the “growth marketing” vocabulary, and its often disregard it entirely. They believe that revenue is the only commercial pillar that is needed for two reasons: they come from narrow specialisms that are completely focused on revenue generation, so that's the only bit they know how to do; and they don't understand *how* marketing affects profitability or *what to do* to affect it, so they convince themselves that their subjective ignorance is actually objective proof it doesn't have any value.
Even worse, the lack of understanding means they will not hesitate to *sacrifice* profit if it means they can spike revenue a little bit more, resorting to pricing gimmicks to get more sales at a lower price and destroying the margin in each sale. When you see growth marketers humble-bragging about taking a business from £200k to £800k revenue, you'll notice they will never mention the margin, or whether that got better. Clue: that's because it didn't; chances are the margin in that £800k was a single digit percentage when all was said and done.
Remember: it's easy to look good at the beginning because doing something new will always show results initially; the question is how long it can be maintained. Growth marketing sells you on the initial impact. You can't go very far on a LinkedIn feed without a growth marketer humble-bragging that they took a start-up from £100k to £800 in six months; the question you need to ask, and the evidence you need to see from them, is whether that was sustained for the next six months, year, two years, and so on. No question will make one of these marketers go as white as a sheet as quickly and spectacularly as this one will.
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WHY "GROWTH MARKETING" IS BUILT TO FAIL #3
There is a conspicuous absence of any credible solutions to the problems it causes.
Good marketers understand marketing, which means they have an idea what to do when things are not working. As “growth marketing” is pushed by marketers with little to no understanding of how marketing works at a fundamental level, their reactions to problems often create more issues than they solve. There are two common ‘solutions’ they resort to: throw more money at it; and pricing gimmicks.
A common characteristic that “growth marketing” shares with other pseudo-specialisms is the false belief in the infallibility of its approach. The problem is never that the activity is flawed; the problem is always that you’re not spending enough money on enough of it. As “growth marketing” doesn’t understand why the returns are dropping, it defaults to blaming the frequency and reach of it (as its usually based on a generic frequency-reach model to begin with); the obvious and easy solution is to increase both, as more activity in more places more of the time will obviously mean it will find more receptive recipients. As these marketers don’t understand marketing, they are making a classic mistake of applying a solid approach to the wrong part of the programme; so they are wasting money trying to get the attention of people who don’t exist without knowing why that spend is completely wasted.
With the fundamental philosophy of revenue, right here, right now, “growth marketing” will also default to solutions that get more sales faster; and the easiest and quickest way to do that is discounts, B.O.G.O.F. offers, and other pricing gimmicks to spike unit sales. As these marketers don’t understand pricing (let alone the knock-on effects of doing it badly), they don’t know that once the reduced price is established, the customer will not go back up again. If you have been selling an £80k product for £50k, the market becomes accustomed to £50k as the fair price and expects that price point: good luck getting them to agree to pay £80k again. Pricing gimmicks change the perception of the brand and the product’s value; and it takes a very, very long time to alter (let alone reverse) those perceptions.
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THE CONSEQUENCES OF "GROWTH MARKETING"
Growth marketing can work in the right environments, and under the right conditions. It can work if the marketer is responsible for holistic commercial growth, and their remit and assessment is based on both revenue and profit: that discourages revenue by sacrificing profit. Similarly, a revenue-only growth marketer can be effective if they are accountable to someone who is responsible for the holistic commercial picture, and their work is alongside, integrated with, and accounting for roles that are responsible for profitability: the revenue-centrism is kept within parameters, and not allowed to run riot over everything. If “growth marketing” is allowed to run the show, what happens?
It’s a bleak picture. The tunnel-vision on revenue, right here, right now means that there’s been little to no profit, so there’s no financial safety net in the bank. That’s unfortunate, as the revenue diamond days have dried up, so that isn’t going to keep the ship afloat on its own. Which is doubly unfortunate, as the growth marketer has already moved without giving you a fix; and their pricing gimmicks have locked you into lower prices, so there’s no quick improvement to sale margins that can help either.
It's left you with a choice, and the options are not pleasant.
#1. Take a commercial hit while you rearrange marketing to provide a better approach.
#2. Regain some margin by cutting the quality of the product.
#3. Balance the spreadsheets in the only quick way available: get that payroll down. Time for lay-offs.
“Growth marketing” is an abhorrent approach because it takes a few months to embed problems that take years to resolve, and the growth marketer isn’t the one who shoulders any of the consequences. It doesn’t just damage revenue numbers; it damages the long-term security and business health that profit brings, the perception of the product and brand in the market, and potentially the job security of people who were nothing to do with the “growth marketing” grift.
“Growth marketing” is not the solution. If anything, it’s the start of bigger problems.
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EPILOGUE:
PLUS ÇA CHANGE, PLUS C'EST LA MÊME CHOSE
There's an important lesson for businesses looking into marketing support: never trust a marketer or marketing specialism that co-opts the current business priority buzzword as a prefix. “Growth marketing” is the latest iteration of marketers rebranding themselves to get away from specialisms that have fallen out of fashion or are losing credibility, with every iteration becoming more disconnected from best practice.
If you go back through its ‘modern’ history, marketing has a track record of doing this. When I started in marketing about 17 years ago at the time of writing (October 2025), businesses were adapting to the influx of digital technologies, and 'digital' became the priority buzzword. Before long there were 1,000-to-the-penny 'digital marketers' pushing 'digital marketing' as the magic bullet. In fairness, this one had some legitimacy. At that time, digital wasn't embedded into every marketer's day-to-day like it is now, so it was a genuinely specialist skillset; unlike now, where digital is so intrinsic in every marketer's role that it is a completely unnecessary prefix.
Digital was the buzzword in the late 2000s, until roughly the mid-2010s. By this time the overpromises of digital marketing had started to get found out, and its stock began to drop. The main culprit was its heavy reliance on vanity metrics, and it was being rumbled for selling itself on big numbers against largely irrelevant metrics. Businesses wanted marketing to have more direct impact on business metrics, so 'performance' became the priority buzzword; and all of a sudden we had 1,000-to-the-penny 'performance marketers' pushing 'performance marketing' as the magic bullet. In most cases they were just channel-specialised digital marketers who put "R.O.I" in their slides where the vanity metrics used to be.
Then the next shift: in the early 2020s, we had the Covid pandemic. Many businesses were hit hard commercially, and recovery became the focus. Businesses prized growth, which became the priority buzzword in the fallout years of the pandemic. Can you guess what happened? Yep: we now have 1,000-to-the-penny 'growth marketers' selling ‘growth marketing' as the quick fix. In reality, they are just junior or mid-level performance marketers (usually very narrow paid media channel specialists) who run into a room, scream "revenue" in everyone's face as loud as they can while pointing at their channel of choice, and then proclaiming that combination as proof that they can save the company.
It is one of the marketing grifter’s go-to tactics, because it works well. It takes advantage of businesses who don't know any better about marketing by promising a quick-fix from ready-made "experts". In reality, it is mediocre marketers manufacturing a false authority by latching onto something businesses are scared of missing out on, and selling their tiny part of the marketing picture as a complete, infallible, and guaranteed fix.
You can already tell that “growth marketing” is a grift because some marketers are already starting to distance themselves from this buzzword-as-prefix. The fact that has happened within a few years of it taking off is always a strong indicator that it was grift all along: most pseudo-specialisms last a lot longer before its rumbled and the diaspora begins.
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Don’t be fooled by these ‘reformed’ or freshly ‘enlightened’ folk. Thankfully they are easily identifiable: they will claim they have ‘discovered’ a better way, had a ‘revelation’ of a superior alternative. They have done neither. The ‘revelations’ and ‘discoveries’ are the things that good, competent marketers have been doing for the past two-plus decades. All they’ve done is found out what better growth marketers (or just marketers) do and post it as their own wisdom on LinkedIn; whether they know how to do any of it is a different story.
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