The Discipline of Scale for Modern CPG Leaders
I’m Kamini Natarajan, a CMO and growth operator with 15+ years of experience scaling consumer brands across wellness, beauty, supplements, skincare, and functional CPG.
I’ve led brand transformation and growth at companies navigating complexity from DTC and subscription scale to Amazon, retail expansion, and omnichannel integration partnering closely with founders, executive teams, and boards.
This site reflects my perspective from the operator’s seat: what actually works, what breaks at scale, and the discipline required to build durable growth.
Modern marketing didn’t become complex because leaders asked for it. It became complex because growth created more channels, more data, and more decisions.
Acronyms, dashboards, and tools aren’t the problem. Misalignment is. When teams optimize locally by channel, metric, or function clarity erodes and momentum slows.
At the executive level, the question isn’t which metric matters most.
It’s whether brand, growth, and operations are reinforcing the same outcome.
Sustainable growth doesn’t come from mastering jargon. It comes from disciplined alignment around what actually moves the business forward.
Marketing isn’t about creating noise.
It’s about creating coherence.
At scale, marketing becomes the connective tissue between product, customer, and performance. It translates strategy into experience, aligns brand promise with delivery, and ensures growth efforts compound rather than compete.
In complex CPG environments, strong marketing doesn’t just drive awareness—it shapes demand, informs decision-making, and reinforces trust across every touchpoint, from first exposure to long-term loyalty.
When marketing is grounded in clarity and discipline, it becomes a force multiplier—supporting sustainable growth rather than chasing short-term wins.
Marketing for Ecommerce
As ecommerce scales, it stops behaving like a channel and starts functioning as an operating system. Every decision: brand, pricing, promotion, lifecycle, fulfillment, and experience becomes interconnected.
At this stage, growth isn’t driven by isolated optimizations. It’s driven by how well acquisition, retention, merchandising, and customer experience reinforce one another across DTC, marketplaces, and retail-adjacent touchpoints.
This section explores the realities of ecommerce at scale: where growth breaks, how teams lose focus, and what disciplined operators do differently to build durable performance rather than short-term spikes.
Lessons from the Operator’s Seat:
Growth at scale is shaped less by best practices and more by tradeoffs, constraints, and imperfect information.
These pieces share anonymized lessons from building and scaling consumer brands across ecommerce, retail, and omnichannel environments focused on what actually works, what often breaks, and where discipline matters most.
Retention That Scales
Designing repeat behavior, not just recovery
Sustainable Growth
Aligning acquisition with long-term value
Brand at Scale
Maintaining clarity as complexity grows
Ecommerce as an Operating System
Building systems that compound across channels
Featured Articles
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The Discipline of Scale
Scaling Isn’t About Doing More. It’s About Doing Fewer Things Well. For most consumer brands, growth doesn’t stall because teams aren’t working hard enough. It stalls because effort becomes fragmented. As brands scale, complexity increases naturally—more channels, more data, more stakeholders, more pressure. The instinctive response is often to add more: more campaigns, more tools,
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CTV and Retail Media Networks
How CTV and Retail Media Networks Are Changing the Game for CPG and Nutraceutical BrandsAre you leveraging Connected TV (CTV) and Retail Media Networks (RMNs) to drive retail sales? If not, you could be missing out on one of the biggest shifts in modern advertising. Traditionally, TV advertising was all about broad awareness—high cost, low
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Navigating the Lean Marketing Landscape in 2025: A CMO’s Perspective
In a challenging economic climate, the role of a CMO becomes even more critical. According to the latest Gartner CMO Survey, marketing budgets have dropped to 7.7% of overall company revenue in 2024 — a notable reduction that underscores the need for a new, more efficient approach. Despite the headwinds, there’s a massive opportunity for
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The Transformative Power of Generous Leadership
In my several years of leadership experience, I’ve come to understand that the most profound impact we can have as leaders doesn’t stem from strategic planning or financial acumen – though these are certainly important. Instead, it comes from something far more fundamental: generosity of spirit. Today, I want to share my perspectives on how