Hacking Marketing

19Marketing in Perpetual Beta with an Innovation Pipeline

Andrew Chen, one of the world's foremost growth hackers, cleverly coined “The Law of [Crappy] Clickthroughs” several years ago, which states: “Over time, all marketing strategies result in [crappy] clickthrough rates.”¹

Actually, Andrew used a harsher adjective than crappy, but this is a family book.

Having worked in product marketing for many years—after starting out as a software engineer early in his career, interestingly enough—Chen recognized a recurring pattern in digital marketing. As new marketing channels, strategies, and tactics were invented, they would generally perform well at first, but then their effectiveness would eventually degrade.

In his post defining this law, he gave a couple of examples. Display advertising on the Web started out with terrific clickthrough rates, which plummeted over time. E-mail marketing had excellent open rates—the percentage of recipients who read a message—at first, but then they declined too. This didn't apply just to clickthroughs but also to the efficacy of any marketing program.

Why? He described several reasons. First, the novelty of a new kind of marketing catches an audience's attention initially, giving it a performance boost, but that novelty eventually wears off. Second, if pioneering marketers are having success with something, other marketers are sure to follow, ramping up competitive noise. And third, as marketing ideas that worked with a small, initial audience ...