What If Growth Is Different
Marketing Unfiltered #74 - Why Rethinking "Growth" Might Be Your Smartest Decision
Good morning friends, can you believe its the end of Q1?!?
I think it is safe to say Harry’s article on the marketing of the Manosphere kicked a few hornets nests…a little like Louis Theroux Netflix did in his documentary ;-)
This week, I’ll plant a seed into your head about Growth and how it’s different to what you think it is. I have 4 observations (and ALOT of questions) about how you can work towards a new breed of growth.
What if growth isn’t net new users? ⭕️
What if growth is thinking about the circles of people around the user?
What if growth was leveraging your user to use your product more but through friends and family? Growth can be different
Less Is More 🔗
What if growth was spending less time on your app?
What if growth was spending less time on your website?
What if growth is sending a request & receiving a link to complete the transaction?
Growth Is Focus 🎯
What if growth is killing off your Android app?
What if growth is a faster website and better user experience?
What if growth is quicker logistics, quicker deliveries, getting known for your service…?
Chat Over Scroll? 💬
What if growth is more chat, less scroll?
What if growth is qualifying you through smart questions and uploads, and less scrolling and guessing where your customer need to go to?
What if conversation is the next big conversion lever?
Accuracy As A Lever To Pull 🩻
What if growth is uploading a long list of likes, dislikes, allergies and your body type?
What if growth is building custom products and bespoke products vs generics with high returns.
What if growth is hyper personalised higher priced products, not cohorts based on generics?
Voice Not Type 🗣️
What if growth is voice based not type and scroll?
What if growth is having conversations with your customer, based on guided conversation threads?
What if growth is a new part of your app or site? An ‘always on’ companion
Time For Growth Rebrand? 🔓
Growth especially Performance Marketing is hitting the limits of being overly optimised, it’s all starting to look and feel the same. It is time to rebalance this.
Growth and Product Growth has for a long time been about more, more people, more nudges, more scrolls, more “asks” from us. More = more, more rarely = less.
What if growth is now about being the company who helps others gain smarter discounts through their friends and family members. This is something that could be measured and embraced.
What if growth doesn’t let algorithms define and dictate what you and your brand are and achieve…
What if growth is about less time with an app or site but a quick chat leading to a complete transaction link inside of the chat interface you live in already? This is already possible.
What if growth is less overheads and tech to maintain? Instead, it’s about the best service to gain growth.
Or what if growth is actually helping customers using their natural language or their native language? Being hyper connected and an interface providing long-term help. Being highly trusted like a creator or a podcaster is...
Growth should/would/could look different, feel different and interact different.
Pure play growth often reminds me of the famous Henry Ford quote:-
- If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
It’s on us to understand the difference between what customers say they want and creating campaigns and products that our actually customers want.
The biggest growth impacts I’ve had in my career have come from thinking differently, stepping up and building solutions customers wouldn’t know they wanted or needed. In some cases, the most successful actively ignored feedback, as it’s my job to make the feature or campaign easy to learn, easy to use, easy to share and then easy to personalise. And when they haven’t been super creative, growth initiatives has been operationally astute.
Growth is going to be high trust, high speed and high fidelity.
Growth is capital ‘B’ Brand, is definitely operational - it’s technical, creative, rethinking what’s being used and misused and then rethinking what’s been done and optimising the experiences.
A business leader is supposed to be a change agent (and i don’t say that lightly). Sometimes we forget this in our everyday battles while arguing who owns what with the CPO, CRO and CFO…
Growth comes from the unexpected, from the unpredictable and often from the hard to measure. Business growth is often built more on gut feel and experience as much from a model or complex set of forecast models. What if Growth comes from rethinking how your customers work and who they’re connected to, with more marketing nudges, emails and messages…
As a Growth or Marketing leader, it’s our job to drive change, to be a ‘change agent’. So the question to think about todayis:-
What flavour of growth will you try next?
Let me know by hitting reply or hitting button below to chat directly
4 Observations From This Week
Agentic AI Is Being Primed To Take Centre Stage: Marketers are being primed to shift toward AI agents as the new promise land of the operating system for personalisation, predictive analytics, creative execution, and decision-making, positioning AI as core infrastructure rather than just a tool. Keep an eye as these promised land tools are still early and buzz definitely doesn’t = success.
Agentic Commerce Push Ahead: OpenAI have rolled out their partnerships Sephora and Shopify this week, the question remains will customers want to shop by search/prompting in a chat window for a product or set of products? (the irony isn’t lost that I push this could be a growth tactic)
SEO Being Positioned As GEO/AEO: With AI-powered “search” dominating conversations, the focus is moving from traditional SEO to Generative Engine Optimisation and AEO. As Brands we must optimise for zero-click answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and the other conversational platforms to stay visible but the ways of tracking and reporting is murky to say the least. Be mindful treating SEO and AEO as the same discipline as although very similar AEO will look to move from content - citation to click to checkout and optimise throughout these touchpoints (I go into detail why AEO and SEO are different here)
Short-Form Video & Micro-Drama Dominate: As I suggested in our 2026 predictions - Short-form video remains the top content investment for many brands, while the “micro-drama” formats (with large brands now sponsoring and creating their own) gaining strong algorithmic traction on platforms like TikTok and Reels driving engagement and conversions. Expect to see a huge push of micro drama ads and brands becoming even more unhinged to cut through the algorithmic feeds. Here’s a good podcast breaking down the micro-drama landscape
Harry’s favourite article from this week
Trashing the ‘science’ behind ad research: System1 and Effie recently published “The Creative Dividend’ a 122 page, self congratulatory puff piece about how creativity and media work together to drive reliable, predictable, and repeatable business results. Daniel Gilbert, CEO of Brainlabs was having none of it, instead pulling out an arsenal of chainsaws, pick axes, Claymores and intercontinental ballistic missiles to rip it a new one. It’s an extremely well constructed take down that raises questions over the tension of research crafted under the umbrella of vested interest- go an read it here
Thanks for reading this week and have a great weekend!
Danny Denhard