Emami growth chief: use influencers only after product market fit

Dhruv Aggarwal, Chief Growth Officer at Emami, said influencer marketing works only after a brand has found product market fit. He was speaking at Inc42’s D2C & Retail Summit 2026, reported on 19 August 2026.

“Once you know that you have a product that everyone should be using, then having influencers drive it works very organically,” Aggarwal said.

He pointed to Brillare, which scaled creator-led videos from 15 a month to 2,000 a month while revenue doubled. Aggarwal was clear that influencer spend cannot compensate for shortcomings in the underlying product. He also said brands past product market fit should aim to respond to cultural moments inside a 24 hour window, and should watch customer acquisition cost closely, pausing campaigns that merely buy sales rather than build demand.

The panel, titled The Consumer Reset: Winning Gen Z, Bharat & Premium India, also featured Malini Adapureddy of Deconstruct, Natasha Tuli of Soulflower and Pradeep Sekhar of Base.com India.

The operator read

Read the Brillare numbers honestly. Video volume rose roughly 130 times while revenue doubled. That is a sub-linear return. It does not mean the programme failed, because revenue has many inputs and no attribution split was given. It does mean the useful question is what the marginal video earned, not what the total programme produced. Volume growth that far ahead of revenue growth usually says the first fifteen videos were doing most of the work.

So build the reporting before you build the volume. Tag creator content by monthly cohort, track revenue per hundred videos month over month, and set a floor below which you stop adding creators and start replacing the weakest ones. If your cost per video is falling faster than your revenue per video, you are buying reach, not demand. Run that check this month, before the festive brief goes out and the volume decision gets made for you.