Shruti Khatod on Brand as a Growth Lever, Not a Side Hustle

Growth Channels Are Brand Amplifiers, Not Isolated Machines

For most of her career, Shruti Khatod operated in the camp of marketers who viewed brand work as peripheral—something other teams handled while growth marketers focused on conversion. That changed at Nutrafol, where she's spent the last four and a half years as VP of Growth Marketing, wrestling with a truth that reshaped her entire philosophy: in a world saturated with digital and social touchpoints, growth channels can't just drive conversions. They have to carry the brand forward.

I almost feel like now growth channels have to be the brand amplifiers. They need to amplify what your voice is, what your experience is, what you want the consumer to take out of.

— Shruti Khatod

This isn't a cosmetic shift. At Nutrafol, Khatod's team ensures that storytelling, color schemes, fonts, and narrative arcs remain consistent whether someone encounters the brand in an upper-funnel awareness play or a last-click retargeting ad. The through-line matters because the customer journey is no longer linear. Touchpoints stack and overlap. When brand and growth teams operate in silos, the customer experiences whiplash. When they're aligned, every ad becomes reinforcement.

The real unlock came when Khatod's team started measuring brand KPIs—aided awareness, unaided awareness, brand favorability—and connecting them directly to cost per acquisition. That's when the conversation with the CFO changed. That's when TV budgets became defensible. That's when brand stopped being a nice-to-have and became a performance driver.

Measurement Is Where Brand and Growth Stop Being Strangers

Khatod's instinct is to sprint toward measurement, and she doesn't apologize for it. The reason brand and growth teams so often operate in parallel universes is simple: they measure different things on different timelines with different benchmarks. Brand teams talk about long-term health. Growth teams talk about this week's ROAS. The gap between those conversations is where alignment dies.

At Nutrafol, Khatod's team works neck-and-neck with the brand team to track how brand favorability and awareness metrics influence day-to-day optimization. They don't just measure brand health in a vacuum and celebrate when the numbers go up. They ask: how does this impact our next quarter's planning? How does this change what we say to different audiences? How do we take advantage of this data?

While we can talk about like brand pieces are measured long-term, if you don't connect that back to how is that impacting your day-to-day optimization, that's where the miss is.

— Shruti Khatod

The methodology and window for measuring effectiveness might differ between brand and growth, but the end goal is identical: drive revenue. When Khatod can walk into a budget conversation armed with both brand lift data and performance metrics that tell one coherent story, scaling becomes easier. Testing new channels becomes easier. The entire machinery of growth becomes easier because the narrative is unified.

This approach has made Nutrafol's paid ads feel less like disconnected tactics and more like chapters in a single, ongoing conversation with the customer. That connectivity—storytelling that flows from awareness to consideration to conversion—isn't just elegant. It's measurable. And that's what matters.

Cracking TV Meant Failing Fast and Iterating on Creative

When Khatod joined Nutrafol four and a half years ago, television was a tiny channel—an experiment, not a strategy. Scaling it was anything but straightforward. Linear TV demands precision: the right creative, the right audience, the right programming, the right dayparts. None of it is cheap. All of it is high-stakes.

The first attempt didn't work. The second attempt sort of worked. The third time, they nailed it. Khatod's team spent the bulk of their energy testing creative—not just linear creative, but also digital creative that could translate into linear formats. They learned that what works on Meta or TikTok doesn't automatically translate to a 30-second spot on cable. The storytelling has to shift. The pacing has to shift. The emotional arc has to land faster.

First time when we took a risk, it didn't work out. Second time, it somewhat worked out. Third time, we nailed it. So I think it is a progression, but it's a much more doable progression now than ever before.

— Shruti Khatod

Because Nutrafol is a premium brand, Khatod's team also had to identify programming watched by audiences with higher household incomes. That meant taking calculated risks on specific spots and dayparts, and it required buy-in from leadership that TV wouldn't deliver overnight wins. The patience paid off. Nutrafol's presence on TV expanded the entire hair category, creating both opportunity and competition.

In the past year, the hair category on TV has exploded. Collagen powders, serums, prescription drugs—everyone's claiming hair growth. That saturation has forced Khatod to double down on a balanced channel portfolio. She doesn't put all her eggs in one basket, because when a channel bubbles up the way TV has, relying on it exclusively becomes a liability. The brands that sustain are the ones with diversified strategies.

The Problem-Solution Formula Still Wins If You Make It Believable

Problem and solution might be one of the oldest advertising techniques in existence, but Khatod leans into it without apology. The difference between cliché and compelling comes down to one thing: believability. Does the problem resonate? Can the audience see themselves in it? Is the solution credible?

Nutrafol's creative team invests heavily in authenticity. Most of the content creators featured in ads actually use the product. Most of the influencers partnered with the brand tell real stories. The brand doesn't manufacture testimonials—it surfaces genuine experiences and builds storytelling around them. That authenticity lands with customers in a way that polished, fabricated narratives can't.

The authenticity at which we have really invested in our partnerships with influencers, our partnership with content creators, our partnership with our brand team and our creative team, our customers, we really, really try very hard to make sure that all the stories that you see in the ads are real stories.

— Shruti Khatod

This approach doesn't just create emotional resonance. It builds trust. In a saturated category where every brand is making bold claims, trust is the differentiator. Khatod's team knows that empathy and credibility are what convert skeptics into customers. The formula is simple. The execution is meticulous.

Playing Chess While Competitors Play Checkers

The pace of change in the digital advertising landscape has accelerated. Meta reinvented itself with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. Google rolled out Performance Max. TikTok keeps renaming and relaunching its smart campaign products. These AI-driven tools deliver efficiency, but they also operate as black boxes—advertisers gain performance at the cost of control.

Khatod sees opportunity in this chaos. While Meta has become saturated in some areas, TikTok is innovating with ad formats like top feed and top view—high-impact placements that deliver massive engagement in short windows. These formats let brands create their own tentpole moments, not just participate in market-wide events like the Super Bowl or award shows.

Having those sort of ad formats to let the brand not only participate in the market tentpole moments, but then make their own tentpole moments really highly engaged through these ad formats is a great innovation in my mind for sure.

— Shruti Khatod

Khatod's philosophy is to think five, seven, ten moves ahead. She doesn't obsess over competitors, but she stays acutely aware of how the marketplace is evolving. The brands that win aren't the ones constantly chasing the next shiny tactic. They're the ones that return to core tenets—brand platform, customer empathy, measurement rigor—and use those as anchors when the landscape shifts.

For Khatod, the difference between growth marketers who thrive and those who stagnate comes down to mindset. Some are playing checkers: tactical, reactive, focused on the next move. Others are playing chess: strategic, proactive, thinking through cascading consequences. The chess players are the ones who treat brand as a growth lever, who connect measurement across teams, who test relentlessly on channels like TV, and who build creative that people actually believe. That's the game Khatod is playing. And at Nutrafol, it's working.