Revving up the growth engine

Leveraging start-up principles and practices to break the growth paradox with Growth Hacking

Growth is the lifeblood of all organisations. The challenge, however, is that growth is getting harder and harder to achieve today. If you are a business leader, you will likely have experienced how mounting market complexities and competitive pressures can make it difficult to sustain, let alone accelerate, organic growth.

Conventionally, growth strategies have been high-risk, high-reward endeavours: investments tend to be few and large, and nearly always entail having to make significant trade-offs between alternatives. But what if there is a proven way for leaders to break these trade-offs and redraw the competing relationships between inputs and outcomes?

Enter Growth Hacking, a practice designed to help organisations crack the code to a more organic approach to growth. Drawing its core principles from digital start-ups and product development philosophy, Growth Hacking works by harnessing the collective power of numerous small-scale, targeted experiments designed to fail fast and rapidly scale successes.

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Towards a low-risk, high-reward paradigm

Growth Hacking represents a low-risk, high-reward paradigm to realising organic growth. It focuses on data and facts, and relies on the use of experiments to limit the scale and scope of investments. Once the practice gains momentum, the incremental gains that it delivers will add up – and business leaders will begin to experience the full benefits of compounded value.

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Conceptual overview

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Key component teams

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Engineered to deliver value

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Case study: Transforming ways of working to unlock exponential growth

Following an initial period of rapid growth, a leading digital-led company in Southeast Asia had found itself struggling to unlock new value in the face of plateauing revenues outside its core lines of business. The implementation of a Growth Hacking pilot enabled it to successfully transform its ways of working – and thereby, unlock exponential growth to overcome this stagnation.

A Growth Hacking practice was launched in a series of sprints to validate, test, and deploy the relevant hypotheses. Highlights included, but were not limited to:

Identification of an underserved ‘local for local’ opportunity

A certain customer segment was found to have been underserved as a result of several issues relating to inventory availability, offering design, value proposition, and payment options. ‘Local for local’ initiatives designed to target these issues resulted in a sixfold increase in market revenue, while also reducing discount spend by half.

Reallocation of resources to optimise investments across the funnel

Within a sizeable line of business, the testing process had validated the hypothesis that existing investments were being channelled to the wrong areas – in this case, customer awareness, instead of inventory and supply. By combining data across several lines of business and structurally breaking down the performance drivers, a set of coordinated and synchronised interventions was developed to better optimise resource allocation. Taken together, these efforts resulted in a more than 40% increase in returns over a six-month period.

Key outcomes of the pilot included: