Kristie Naha-Biswas joined Karo Healthcare just over a year ago with a clear but sizable brief: transform the media model of a global business built on intensely-local brands, without the budget advantages enjoyed by bigger competitors. As Global Head of Media and Digital Marketing, she spoke to New Digital Age about retail media, the influencer shift toward healthcare experts, the GEO opportunity, and why “bold and badass” is more than just a meeting room slogan.
From agency to client side
Naha-Biswas spent most of her career in media agencies, working across global strategy and leadership roles with brands ranging from Vodafone and McDonalds to GSK Consumer (Haleon) and Estee Lauder Companies. The move to Karo, a Swedish-origin company with more than20 brands across multiple markets, including E45 in the UK and a significant skincare portfolio across the Nordics, was a shift she describes with candour.
“You suddenly realise there is so much more to the job on the client side than just signing off a media plan,” she says. “It is really easy to be in an agency and think, well, they haven’t replied to my email, why haven’t they approved this? And there is so much going on.”
That complexity is compounded by the nature of Karo’s portfolio. It is, as she puts it, a global business of really local brands, where the consumer challenge varies enormously by market and the budgets do not stretch to matching what larger FMCG rivals can deploy.
Balancing performance and brand
Rather than treating brand and performance as separate disciplines, Naha-Biswas grounds her planning in what she calls a path-to-purchase model, mapping consumer behaviour to identify the moments that matter most. The logic is straightforward: if someone is searching for a solution to foot fungus, you intercept them at that point; if they are in the online shop, you convert them there.
“It is very much consumer behavioural-based in terms of showing up in the right places at the right time,” she says.
Retail media plays an increasingly central role in this approach, particularly in the UK, where it supports both conversion and, more recently, upper-funnel launch activity, including within the Amazon ecosystem. The picture varies by market, with each country at a different stage of retail media development.
Influencer marketing and the expert shift
Influencer marketing is growing in importance across Karo’s brand portfolio, but the approach reflects the health and beauty categories the company operates in. Naha-Biswas is clear that credibility and trust are critical, which has led to a deliberate focus on professional voices, nutritionists, dermatologists and other healthcare experts, alongside more mainstream consumer influencers.
Two dedicated in-house leads manage each strand, with the expert marketing lead cultivating direct relationships with professional voices and the influencer marketing lead building connections with consumer creators.
The ambition, she says, is to move toward more native social activity and away from standard advertising formats, while connecting influencer work to bigger campaign ideas so that everything, from television to out-of-home to social, amplifies the same narrative.
Bold and badass: closing the gap between media and creative
One of the more significant structural changes Naha-Biswas has driven at Karo is bringing media, creative, and content together from the very start of the briefing process, rather than treating them as sequential steps. The internal mantra, which she says arrived unexpectedly from a meeting and never left, is “bold and badass.”
Her counterpart, the head of design and creative, has been a central partner in building this new model. The goal is to move beyond TV assets and matching luggage, ensuring that influencer briefs, social content, and paid media all emerge from the same creative thinking.
“It is painful in some parts because you make people go backwards and say no, we have to start from the beginning,” she acknowledges. “But it is going through that to get the behavioural change.”
GEO, AI, and the search opportunity
On AI, Karo is pursuing two parallel tracks. The first is operational, using AI to improve briefing efficiency and build capability among brand managers in smaller markets.
The second is strategic, accelerating both SEO and generative engine optimisation simultaneously, having recognised that search, whether traditional or AI-driven, is a fundamental behaviour for consumers looking for help with conditions such as eczema, hemorrhoids, or foot fungus.
“We were a bit slow to the party with SEO, so we have decided we will do them both at the same time,” Naha-Biswas says. She is candid that the challenge is not just the strategy itself but helping people inside the business understand that there is no single blueprint and that the landscape will keep shifting.
For AI-generated creative, Karo is moving carefully, conscious that authenticity is central to its credibility in healthcare. Automation is being explored, but with caution.
Measurement and momentum
On measurement, Naha-Biswas is straightforward about the difficulty. The focus is on building a set of signals, including MMM, brand search demand, and attention analysis, that allow her to demonstrate to the leadership team that all available levers are being used effectively, even where direct sales attribution remains hard to isolate.
Looking ahead, her biggest hope is that the GEO model will open up genuinely new customer acquisition for brands that have historically underinvested in search visibility. Her biggest challenge, she says, is prioritisation across a portfolio of this scale, and delivering everything brilliantly across so many brands and markets simultaneously.
With the media and creative integration still bedding in and the GEO opportunity just beginning to unfold, she is hoping that in six months there will be some properly bold results to shout about.
