What is the growth equation in marketing, and how do you use it to find a brand’s source of growth?

The growth equation says a brand’s size is penetration x frequency x average weight of consumption x price per unit. To grow, a brand has to raise one of those four numbers, and the one it picks is its source of growth.

Varun Satia, founder and CEO of Kraftshala and a former brand manager on Maggi Noodles, calls this the starting point of marketing strategy. Every campaign’s business objective comes from it.

Below, you’ll see what each lever means, how brands like Maggi, Swiggy, SpiceJet and ChatGPT have used them, and why this simple formula matters if you’re aiming for your first marketing job.

What do the four parts of the growth equation mean?

Each lever answers a different question about the buyer:

• Penetration: how many people buy you at all.
• Frequency: how often they buy.
• Average weight of consumption: how much they consume in one sitting.
• Price per unit: how many rupees you charge for each unit sold.

This reduces every marketing plan to four possibilities. Before you think about the ad, the influencer or the channel, you ask one question: where will the extra sales come from?

Varun puts it from the brand manager’s side. If you’re planning a Maggi campaign, you first need to know what your future buyer was doing before. That tells you what you have to convince them of.

This is also how Kraftshala’s screening test works. There’s no aptitude section. You’re shown an ad and asked what the brand manager’s strategy was: the business objective and the target user. The growth equation is the quickest way to answer, because it forces you to name one lever instead of just describing the ad. (Here’s more on what the Marketing Launchpad screening test and program involve.)

How does price per unit work in a real brand?

When Varun joined the Maggi team, the noodles sold at ₹10 for 80 grams. Inflation made that hard to sustain, so his first project was cutting the pack to 75 grams, and later to 70 grams. That changed the price per unit without touching the printed price.

Why not just raise the price? In the years before UPI, retailers pushed back on odd prices because customers didn’t carry loose change. FMCG brands stayed at “magic price points” like ₹5 and ₹10, or risked losing shelf space.

Cutting grammage wasn’t simple either. According to Varun, Nestlé was making about eight lakh packets of Maggi a day across roughly a dozen factories, and the product still had to fill a stomach and taste right. When 70 grams couldn’t go any lower, Maggi moved from ₹10 to ₹12. That was the last campaign Varun worked on at Maggi, with music by Shankar Mahadevan.

What do frequency and average weight of consumption look like?

Average weight of consumption

This lever is about one sitting. Maggi launched a larger pack of around 105 grams, against the regular 70, so people ate more each time.

Skincare brands use the same lever through routines. First it’s a face wash. Then a cream. Then a third step, and then separate day, night, weekday and dry-skin regimes. Each new step adds to what one customer uses.

One older example Varun often uses is a 1990s toothpaste brand (he keeps it unnamed for legal reasons) that widened its nozzle. People measure toothpaste by length, not weight, so a wider nozzle pushed more paste out with every brush.

Frequency

Frequency is how often someone comes back. If a person eats Maggi once a month and you get them to eat it twice, sales grow without finding a single new customer.

Think back to the Swiggy and Zomato ads from the period after the second COVID wave. Many people had cut back on ordering outside food, for health and money reasons. The apps didn’t argue with that. Their ads suggested adding one dish or a dessert to a home-cooked meal, a “tadka” of outside food.

Most people remember those ads because they were funny. Varun’s point is that the strategy underneath was frequency: more orders from people who already used the apps.

What is the difference between brand penetration and category penetration?

Penetration means getting a non-user to start buying you, and there are two kinds:

• Brand penetration pulls users away from competitors in the same category.
• Category penetration brings in people who don’t use the category at all.

For an airline, brand penetration means winning a flyer who uses another airline. Category penetration means winning someone who takes trains or buses today.

SpiceJet’s “Red Hot Spicy” relaunch ad, about hot meals on board, is brand penetration. Only people who already fly care about airline food, so the ad speaks to travellers tired of cold sandwiches on other airlines.

Large brands often run both at once. Varun says that roughly a decade ago, Maggi had about 80% household penetration in urban India but only about 15% in rural India. So its rural campaigns were classic category building: getting new households to try instant noodles at all.

New categories lean heavily on category penetration. Look at the ChatGPT ads that show someone asking how to avoid multiple bank visits for a home loan. They don’t claim to beat Claude, Perplexity or Gemini. They teach people what an AI chatbot is useful for. Nescafé has done similar category work for years in a country where most people drink tea.

Want to decode real brands like this? Kraftshala’s PGP in AI-Led Marketing is a 9-month, full-time, on-campus program in Gurugram, built around brand strategy problems like these. You work on live projects with real brands and learn from industry leaders who have run them.

Why does a fresher aiming for a 7 to 10 LPA marketing role need this?

AI is cutting admin and execution-heavy entry-level jobs. At the same time, hiring for people who can solve problems is growing. Varun points to Kraftshala’s own placements: they grew 80% year on year from January to March 2026 and 147% in July and August, with more than 1,000 people placed in 14 months. The roles he means pay about ₹6.5 to 7 lakh a year on average for a fresher. (For a wider view of where marketing pay is heading, see the highest-paying digital marketing jobs in India.)

The reason is volume. “Instead of a five people team creating five ads in a month, now it’s five people team creating 500 ads in a month,” Varun says. With that many creatives and platforms, one senior person can no longer make every decision while juniors execute. Each person on the team makes strategy calls.

This applies to performance marketing too. Since Meta’s Andromeda update, the algorithm finds audiences from the creative itself. Varun’s view is that a performance marketer’s job is now to work out what will convince users, and to make sure the creative and the user journey address their triggers and barriers. You can’t write that brief if you don’t know which lever of the growth equation the campaign is meant to move.

How to practise the growth equation

Take any ad you see this week and ask two questions:

1. What was this buyer doing before they saw the ad?
2. Which of the four levers is the brand trying to move?

Write down your answer in one line, for example: “Swiggy dessert ad: frequency, existing users ordering one more time a week.” After ten ads, you’ll start spotting the lever within seconds. For longer worked examples, read how Red Bull and Asian Paints built their marketing strategies, and try naming the lever behind each move. Varun’s reverse marketing playlist on Kraftshala’s YouTube channel also decodes real ads this way.

Wrapping up

The growth equation breaks a brand’s sales into four levers: penetration, frequency, average weight of consumption and price per unit. Maggi’s shrinking packs, Swiggy’s “add one dish” ads, SpiceJet’s hot meals and ChatGPT’s home-loan ad each pull a different one. Naming the lever first is what turns a description of an ad into a strategy, and it’s the skill that brand managers and performance marketers now use daily.

If you want structured practice on real brands, Kraftshala’s Marketing Launchpad, a digital marketing course with placement, teaches strategy alongside execution through live projects, online over 6 months full-time or 11 months part-time. Its screening test starts with this same ad-decoding exercise. If you’d prefer to learn on campus, the PGP in AI-Led Marketing offers a 9-month, full-time program in Gurugram. Both publish batch-wise placement reports, so you can check outcomes before you apply.