Growth and marketing: increasingly inseparable disciplines

Marketing and growth. Complementary, these two disciplines have been appearing in an increasingly organic way in the day-to-day of companies. If in digital natives, in many cases, marketing and growth are under the responsibility of the same leadership, in other companies, the two disciplines materialize in the division of processes. Fact is that these two themes are increasingly inseparable.
Fernando Vilela, Rappi's director of strategy, explains that separating marketing growth doesn't make sense, they both walk together.
"So much so that the most technically appropriate name is Growth Marketing. Many people, especially native growth people, end up saying that marketing, thinking about the funnel, looks only at the top, building the brand, but the theory shows us that marketing can also be considered the complete funnel, moving from brand building, customer acquisition and retention."
Still according to Vilela, the great innovation that the concept of growth brought to marketing is in the methodology. "Growth brings to the discipline a dynamic of constant experimentation and intense use of data, of tests of infinite hypotheses, which ends up helping all marketers to make faster, more efficient and assertive decisions."
Thus, according to Vilela, the two disciplines complement each other because they allow testing and climbing faster than the traditional marketing manual.
In the case of Rappi, vilela explains, the marketing team seeks to understand, via growth methodology, what is the user profile that buys in each vertical of the superapp.
"As the company has different verticals, we understand that a certain type of user consumes more supermarkets, as well as others with restaurants and petshops. With this, we can do numerous segmentations or clusters of individuals so that when generating volume for the platform, whether through pure performance campaign or branding, it is possible to do this segmentation in the online world", says Vilela.
Ariel Grunkraut, VP of sales and marketing at Burger King Brazil, recalls that they are complementary strategic concepts, although distinct.
"At Burger King, we know that while we need to rely on solid marketing planning – the tool that has increasingly connected us with our consumers – we understand that growth keeps us growing and is also an asset that allows us to create loyalty, adding more users to our platforms, generating volume and capillarity. That is, in BK, we chose to work combining the two tools to ensure the success of the business and this has generated important fruits for the company.", he explains.
As a way to deal with this new reality, Ariel explains that BK created, in 2018, within the vice presidency of marketing and sales a digital area, today composed of more than 20 people with different profiles, responsible for CRM, innovations, open innovation, partnership with startups, among other transformations.
"At Burger King, 360° strategies have become essential pillars for the company's development. We know that in addition to physical interaction, the way we create deeper dialogues and more complete experiences for our consumers is from technological assets: whether it's social networks, apps, new payment methods, self-service totems, and more. We believe that digital transformation needs to move alongside marketing strategies, because at the end of the entire chain, we are talking about the same goal: the complete consumer experience," ariel says.
"If we think about the definition of marketing, we see that growth should be a premise for the whole process, because that traditional marketing as we know it did not allow growth, which is quite demanded with the challenges of digital and disruptive new entrants. Now, when we go to the definition of the responsibilities of the Chief Growth Officer, we see that there is an overlap with the functions of a CMO. And with the search for deep efficiency of organizations, it is a trend that this combination occurs in companies", says Eduardo Tomiya, founding partner of TM20 Branding.
- Luiz Gustavo Pacete