Short notes from 20+ years of running growth. New pieces appear here and on LinkedIn.
Most growth problems aren't strategy problems. They're joins.
When growth stalls, the instinct is to look for a better strategy. In my experience, the strategy is usually fine. The problem sits between teams.
The performance team buys customers the CRM team never speaks to again. The marketplace team cuts prices the D2C team then has to match. The data that would settle an argument lives with one person, while the decision gets made by another.
None of these teams is doing a bad job. They're each doing their own job well, in isolation. That's the trap.
So before you rewrite the strategy, map the joins. Where does a customer pass from one team to the next? Where does a number change hands? Where does nobody own the outcome? Fix two or three of those, and growth often returns without a new plan at all.
Your cheapest growth is the customer you already have
At Vodafone, in the year after Jio launched and prices collapsed, we found ₹24 crore of incremental revenue. It didn't come from new customers. It came from the ones we already had.
We grouped customers by where they lived, how they used the service and what device they carried. Then we made each group an offer that fitted them, at a moment that made sense. Every programme ran against a control group, so we knew the revenue was real.
Most consumer brands do the opposite. Nearly all the money goes into acquiring customers, and almost none into the ones who've already paid once. A monthly discount email isn't a retention programme.
Start small. Pick your best-selling product, look at who bought it 60 to 90 days ago and hasn't returned, and give them one good reason to come back. Measure it against a group you leave alone.
Before you cut CAC, find out where it already works
When acquisition gets expensive, the usual answer is to try a new channel. Sometimes that works. More often, the fastest savings are hiding in the channels you already run.
At Airtel, we cut the cost of acquiring a broadband customer by about 30%. We didn't find a new channel. We moved the field force to the markets where it was already converting, stopped funding the teams that weren't, and rebuilt incentives so people were paid for the right outcome.
The same logic applies to a D2C brand. Break your CAC down by channel, city, product and creative. You'll usually find a few pockets that work very well and a long tail that quietly burns money. Move spend towards the pockets before you test anything new.