Karan Sanghavi promoted to director, strategy and growth at Grapes Worldwide

BENGALURU: Most people like brands. Karan Sanghavi prefers to ask why. That curiosity has now earned him a promotion: Grapes Worldwide has elevated him to director, strategy and growth, under the tagline “From driving ideas to driving growth”.

The agency was upbeat in its announcement. “Karan’s journey has been marked by curiosity, strategic thinking, and a constant drive to look beyond the obvious,” it said. In his new role, he will take this forward by shaping strategies, unlocking opportunities and driving growth for the organisation. “Here’s to the next chapter, Karan,” the announcement concluded.

Sanghavi joined Grapes Worldwide as strategy director in March 2025, working remotely from New Delhi. In that role he leads brand positioning, go-to-market and communication strategy across more than 15 accounts spanning fast-moving consumer goods, automotive, fintech, technology, healthcare, wellness, luxury and business-to-business.

His own summary is a neat one. For more than 10 years across India and the US, he says, he has been figuring out what makes people choose, remember and come back to brands, then turning those answers into strategy that moves the business. His approach sits somewhere between marketing, data analytics and consumer psychology. He likes digging past what people say to understand why they behave the way they do, then turning that insight into sharper positioning, stronger products, new market opportunities and campaigns people actually care about. He has built brands from scratch, repositioned established ones, taken businesses into new markets and helped turn strategy into measurable growth. His philosophy fits in a sentence: the best strategy does not just make people notice a brand, it gives them a reason to choose it.

The record behind the philosophy is broad. Sanghavi spent nearly four years in Houston, Texas, first as a strategist at DECODE from July 2021 to January 2025. He was hired to support DECODE Digital’s transformation into a data-driven marketing agency, with the tagline “Data In, Chemistry Out”. He was the central point of contact for all incoming client briefs, translating client objectives into actionable strategies by managing budgeting, negotiating timelines and laying the foundation for creative execution. His focus was innovative, data-backed solutions for healthcare systems in the US, with optimal return on investment and client satisfaction in mind.

His responsibilities there included messaging strategies, social media plans and targeting frameworks for healthcare clients, plus competitive analysis and campaign audits to identify improvements and maximise returns. He built digital marketing strategies combining audience segmentation, channel optimisation and behavioural insights, and managed collaboration between business development, creative and analytics teams. He used project management tools such as Trello and Asana for timely delivery, and made recommendations through A/B testing, conversion tracking and performance analytics.

After Unlock Health acquired DECODE, his role as senior marketing strategist grew in scope and scale, over the same period from July 2021 to January 2025. He created client briefs, developed messaging strategies, delivered client presentations and led ideation for creative projects. The major pivot was turning marketing services into scalable, plug-and-play marketing products for the healthcare industry, designed around technology and AI integration, and offering ready-to-use tools for clients and potential healthcare plans. He also developed data-informed creative briefs, led cross-functional ideation sessions and used data visualisation and storytelling to make the case for proposed strategies.

Before that, from October 2020 to July 2021, he was a part-time marketing data analyst at Alice & Albert, Inc., working remotely from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He used data-driven approaches for healthcare, fast-moving consumer goods and retail clients, focusing on profitability analysis, A/B testing and comparative analytics. He analysed performance with multi-touch attribution models and adjusted campaign filters, which increased conversion rates significantly. He designed and ran A/B tests to lift web traffic and optimise user acquisition funnels, and produced recommendations for product promotion campaigns that improved return on investment. He also designed surveys and applied predictive analytics to improve website user interface and experience, which resulted in higher customer retention. A millennial-focused brand storyline, built on psychographic profiling and trend analysis, increased engagement and profitability.

In his first nonprofit role, as a marketing intern at the Satell Institute from June to September 2020, he worked on digital branding, restructured the brand image and refined messaging frameworks. He led cross-platform campaigns, ran fundraising events and built engagement platforms for affluent philanthropists to support the initiatives of Ed Satell. His branding campaigns boosted the organisation’s digital footprint by 700 per cent through search engine optimisation, content marketing and social media analytics. He led the development and design of the 2020 annual report, created scalable social media templates using Photoshop, InDesign and iMovie, and interviewed chief executives and nonprofit leaders for thought leadership content.

Back in India, as head of marketing and product development at B Babu & Sons in Mudhol, Karnataka, from January 2018 to September 2019, Sanghavi was hired to modernise a 100-year-old family textile business. He drove digital transformation to attract a younger customer base while preserving the brand’s legacy, revamping social media, implementing customer relationship management systems, optimising vendor relationships and building frameworks for data acquisition and customer segmentation. The results included 15 new clients in a year, contributing to a 30 per cent rise in revenue, and five new product lines that drove a 35 per cent increase in annual net sales. His campaigns improved daily customer footfall by 20 per cent, and demand forecasting and a supply chain plan raised inventory turnover and cash flow efficiency. He credits strategic brand repositioning and product development with turning the business into a global market player.

At Pink Lemonade Communications Pvt Ltd in Bengaluru, from May 2016 to December 2017, he worked at what he describes as the city’s top marketing agency. He bridged creative teams (design, content, web development) with business teams (client servicing, business development) and, after two promotions, became project manager. He directed all four creative teams to deliver campaigns for 240 clients, including General Electric, Jockey and Wipro. As creative director on 55 projects, he contributed to 40 per cent of the agency’s annual revenue. Data-driven algorithms that tracked employee utilisation in real time lifted daily deliverables by 50 per cent, a horizontal work structure drove 20 per cent annual revenue growth, and he delivered more than 6,000 creative assets.

His earliest roles were among the most dramatic. As assistant marketing manager at Runnr, from April 2015 to April 2016, he was a core team member of what he calls one of India’s fastest-growing start-ups, working on recruitment marketing and business expansion. He led a team of 60 to recruit 1,500 delivery personnel in nine cities within a 90-day deadline, and grew the workforce from 350 to 2,900 in two months, scaling daily deliveries from 500 to 10,000. He also drove growth by optimising $7m in venture capital funding to expand operations across seven states, and says his work supported Runnr’s acquisition by Zomato, enabling the launch of Zomato’s food delivery platform. Before that, as a marketing intern at GoAir in Mumbai from March to June 2014, he designed a customer journey mapping framework that reduced passenger lag time across nine major airports in India, and acted as internal communications liaison for the IPL team Kings XI Punjab, travelling with the squad.

The analysis is straightforward. Sanghavi’s career has run on one thread: find out why people behave as they do, then build the strategy around the answer. It has taken him from delivery-rider recruitment at breakneck pace and a century-old textile business to healthcare marketing in the US and a multi-sector agency brief. That range matters for a director of strategy and growth. Agencies rarely lack ideas, but they often lack a person who can tie an idea to numbers, and his record is thick with figures: 700 per cent, 35 per cent, 40 per cent. The new title pairs strategy with growth, and for Sanghavi the two have never been separate.