Marketing vs. Growth - Difference and Comparison

What is Marketing?

Marketing is a very broad discipline and entails all those activities that help to promote a product or a service to the targeted consumer. It includes all measures deployed to evaluate, and satisfy the consumer needs by promoting the right products that will help to fulfil their needs and wants. From communication to exchanging offerings, there’s a lot that marketing entails. Marketing plays a key role when it comes to establishing trust for a brand in the minds of customers.

What is Growth?

Growth is again a very broader concept and includes everything that helps a business or an organisation to achieve its objective. Growth in profit margins would help the business to achieve its profitability objective; an increase in customer base is again a growth that helps to achieve the customer acquisition objective. In this context, growth is about finding avenues that help to gain more customers at the highest profit margins.

Also read: What is Growth Marketing?

Marketing vs Growth

Now that we have individually explored the concepts of marketing and growth, let’s understand how the two differ by analysing marketing and growth in detail.

• So, the first and most basic difference is that growth takes a more holistic approach to achieve the organisational objective, whereas marketing has a very narrow approach towards achieving some specific goals.

• Another important distinction between marketing and growth is that marketing focuses on aspects such as brand awareness and customer acquisition whereas growth factors in other important aspects that are related to product activation, customer retention, revenue, and referrals.

• Marketing teams in the organisations are usually focused on KPIs such as signups, new users, downloads, etc. The growth teams take a more holistic view and focus on all those KPIs that drive the organisation forwards in some way or the other. Examples include daily active users, monthly active subscribers, leads, registrations, daily new users, etc.

• Marketing teams usually consist of people who have some experience in copywriting, graphic designing, paid acquisition, etc. You won’t find people who are working in the capacity of engineers, data scientists, product managers, etc. In the case of growth teams, there are other professionals in addition to those who look after marketing.

• One of the main points of differentiation between marketing and growth is that product marketing is generally focused on adding value before the sales process; it helps to facilitate the same. Growth, on the other hand, is more focused towards value addition post-sales processes.

• Product marketing is closely knit with acquisition oriented teams that are associated with sales and marketing whereas the retention driven teams are more closely aligned with the growth process, this entails product, UI/UX designing, customer satisfaction etc.

Comparing marketing vs growth

Now we have a very clear understanding of what marketing and growth are and how marketing vs growth differs. Marketing is all about laying the bedrock for gaining customers and establishing trust; it helps to create awareness in the minds of consumers that helps to drive sales. Growth is all about identifying new avenues, testing new strategies, and finding the best-suited approach to gain customers and increase profitability.

Interesting: Growth Marketing Experiments: An Innovative Strategy for Better Growth

When you compare marketing vs growth, you’ll find that marketing is a subset of growth. Growth is more about the optimisation of the process and experimenting with different techniques. Marketing is more about following a proven strategy that has been beneficial for the company’s success in the past. If you look closely, the growth process has multiple stages, including traction, expansion, and optimisation. All these stages are linked to finding the best way of gaining and retaining customers profitably.

In the traction stage, the business is focused on finding the ideal customer and putting out the right message in the market that explains the product. The expansion stage is all about retaining existing customers and finding new ones through different channels. By the expansion stage, you have already found out what’s working for the company. The optimisation stages are all about optimising your process and focusing on the best way to increase the profits.

The bottom line

In the modern capitalist society, marketing a product that the consumer already wants makes more sense and brings more profits for the companies as the demand is already established. The role of marketing is indispensable; however, the context and strategies have changed.