The Growth Lab: Experimentation for More Authentic Communication
The Growth Lab is an experiment born out of our frustration with the current state of B2B marketing.
Most marketing today is truly awful. We're bombarded with generic emails, bland content, and robotic interactions in our DMs. We've created frustrating, overwhelming experiences that leave us feeling disconnected and unappreciated.
This isn't something new or secret; saying marketing is awful isn't even a controversial opinion. Gary Vee wrote about how Marketers Ruin Everything nearly a decade ago, explaining that Marketers see where people are communicating and then hop on and start polluting the space.
The problem isn't people joining the platform but that most marketers choose to communicate like they're shouting at their audience when great communication is a two-way conversation.
"We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology." - Dr. E.O. Wilson, Father of Sociobiology
Generative AI and advances in technology enable marketers to overwhelm the ways we communicate by shouting exponentially louder and faster. Dr. Wilson highlights just how poorly equipped we are to handle these advances in technology.
I am worried about the trajectory that we're on, and I think the only way to avoid this dystopia is to build a community that uses these technologies to facilitate deeper, more authentic conversations.
The thing is, as people who are marketed to, we want to engage with quality content that provides us value: it helps us learn, discover exciting new things, and solve pressing problems. We're all hungry for authentic conversations that help entertain and improve our lives. It's the irrelevant and poorly produced content that wastes our energy.
B2B marketers are some of the biggest contributors to this pollution issue. We forget businesses are driven by people and communicate like they aren't. Weak marketing starts with internal motives, values, and offers without trying to understand who they aim to connect with.
Trying to be understood without understanding creates a disconnect, and leaves us with the feeling of not being heard. Feeling heard is a vital part of human connection and in an era of impersonal inauthentic noise, communicating with authenticity becomes a competitive edge.
Our goal is to help people understand their audience better, communicate more effectively, and scale their approach without losing authenticity. We want to help people talk "with" less than "at." This delivers better results for businesses and helps us as marketers stop ruining how we communicate.
At A&C Growth, we work at the intersection of data, design, and technology to make this happen. Data helps us understand people better, design enables us to communicate more effectively, and technology is a force multiplier on our efforts. We help clients grow faster and launch products that move our goals in communication farther faster.
Pushing this frontier we're constantly learning, trying, and failing with new experiments. We're launching the Growth Lab to start a conversation with other people innovating in this space, to share what we learn, and to help make marketing more personable.
In the Growth Lab, you can expect to see:
- Real-Life Experiments: We steal strategies and tactics from B2C spaces – think everything from e-commerce, local brick & mortar businesses, luxury brands, and packaged goods to political parties, influencer branding, non-profits and research organizations – and apply them in the B2B space.
- Authentic, Actionable Insights: We'll analyze the results from a first principles perspective to distill the psychology behind what actually drives B2B growth. You'll get the raw data, the honest takeaways (both successes and failures), and the actionable insights you can use to optimize your own campaigns.
- Industry Perspectives: We'll feature other B2B professionals who are also pushing the boundaries and finding new ways to connect with their audience. Through diverse perspectives, we'll share innovative approaches to try.
- Engaging Discussions: We want to be a collaborative community. We encourage you to share your experiences on our subreddit, ask questions on twitter, and connect with other subscribers on discord. Together we can learn from each other and help make our efforts to communicate more fun, exciting, and human.
In our first edition, we'll dive into our first big experiment: Prospect Monitor, a sales research tool that helps busy professionals stay updated on their clients by delivering customer intelligence directly to their inbox.
We'll cover the go-to-market strategy, our customer profiles, hypotheses, experiments we're running, and lessons learned. No NDA required. ;)
We're excited to have you join us on this journey. Please reach out with your thoughts, feedback, and ideas to hear about.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Alex Christenson
A&C Growth
[email protected]