Agreed. While the tactics are great and undoubtedly effective it should be classified as a lesser used word these days - Marketing.

I think you might be confused.

1) Marketing is far more popular today as it was a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago etc. Especially with the rise of SaaS tooling there has been a lot of innovation and interesting work coming out of this space. And let’s not forget influencer and content marketing both of which are relatively new concepts.

2) Growth hacking is not just about marketing. It is a cross functional system bringing in expertise from engineering, data science, sales, marketing, finance etc. It isn’t specificaly a marketing activity but could be growth hacking against a range of business metrics.

> Marketing is far more popular today as it was a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago etc.

Although it might seem that way[1], I'm curious what you'd point me at to persuade me that that's true.[2]

> It isn’t specificaly a marketing activity…

By most definitions (and regardless of title), marketing is anything associated with buying and selling a product or service. It's a pretty wide net.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ... [2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

Growth hacking is predominately about online businesses. And it's a pretty solid fact that there are more of those every year than in the preceding year.

And not sure what you mean here. Growth hacking is not just about marketing. There are plenty of growth hacking initiatives for improving financial or business metrics e.g. employee retention.

Might want to read the book about Growth Hacking to understand the discipline and why it is getting more and more popular. It actually isn't just some lame name to describe a few marketing tricks.

Marketing departments everywhere do the same thing you are using to describe "growth hacking." They convene with members of other departments to construct the brand in a way that is cohesive with how the product or service operates (and should be perceived).