The One Hack Left in Growth Marketing

What happens when the person running growth at nine-figure brands decides the entire growth marketing industry is broken?Cherene Aubert knows a thing or two about it. She spent nearly two decades in growth, scaled Bobbie from zero to nine figures in two years, and then ran the full digital business at ILIA Beauty — DTC, Amazon, global advertising, data, and customer experience. She walked away from what she calls her dream job to start Growth Capital, a brand-led growth agency staffed with senior operators, because she watched brands hand million-dollar-a-day budgets to people in their first or second job and then ask why the business wasn't growing.In this episode, our host Robyn Nissim sits down with Cherene as she shares why social commerce is the flywheel that separates the brands still scaling from the ones stalling out, the step-by-step TikTok Shop playbook from P&L to creator community, and how she learned to quantify brand during a national infant formula crisis by tracking share of voice instead of sales.Presented by Social Snowball.KEEP IN TOUCH 👋📲 Follow Cherene Aubert on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chereneetemadi/ )📲 Follow Cherene Aubert on X (https://x.com/chereneaubert )📲 Follow Robyn Nissim (https://www.instagram.com/igobyrobyn/ )📲 Follow Word of Mouth (https://www.instagram.com/wordofmouth.pod/ )☃️ Learn more about Social Snowball (https://www.socialsnowball.io/ )💌 Join our community (https://wom.beehiiv.com/ )CHAPTERS00:00 - The problem nobody in growth marketing will admit01:04 - Meet Cherene: Bobbie, ILIA, and two decades in growth02:24 - Why growth marketing has no apprenticeship05:13 - How the pandemic finally made organic matter08:09 - What a performance marketer learns inside a brand-first company09:30 - The one thing every fast-growing brand has in common11:35 - Quantifying brand during the infant formula crisis13:21 - Shutting down the business to protect subscribers14:40 - Share of voice, the White House, and the Ashley Graham campaign16:37 - The brand love finance teams refuse to count18:45 - How TikTok collapsed the beauty funnel19:53 - TikTok Shop as a content and awareness engine22:14 - Step one: where your brand actually fits on TikTok Shop23:43 - The Javy coffee story and the omnichannel proof26:54 - Why Super Bowl ads are usually a bad investment27:30 - Unexpected white space and the TikTok-to-Amazon halo29:36 - Building the P&L before you build the program32:27 - Recruiting creators and running them like a sales force34:43 - Why social and influencer should be their own function35:41 - The Sephora field sales lesson behind every affiliate program36:14 - Scaling a community from 17M to 24M with education38:27 - What's really stopping brands from doing this39:08 - The only two growth hacks left40:31 - The new pipeline to CMO42:21 - If your ad isn't made for that screen, it fails43:19 - The Ulta program that hit $1M in six months44:34 - Retail media versus paying influencers to go in store47:55 - Organic as the testing ground for paid48:56 - The burnout that put her in bed49:44 - You are in control of your rest52:48 - Her father's rule: work fits the container you give it53:39 - Nine months in: delegation and resourcing the opportunity55:00 - Building an agency of senior operators57:22 - Fixing the broken apprenticeship in growth58:09 - Her word of mouth: respected, loved, appreciated59:18 - Kindness is the biggest cheat code