Thursday, January 29, 2026
Sunanda Khaitan Named HUL Beauty & Wellbeing CMO
The GMA Admin
Unilever elevates Sunanda Khaitan as CMO, Beauty & Wellbeing at HUL. Her 19+ years across Lakmē, Pond’s and global roles shape the 2026 roadmap.
Unilever appoints Sunanda Khaitan as CMO, Beauty & Wellbeing at HUL
Unilever has elevated Sunanda Khaitan to Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for the Beauty & Wellbeing portfolio at Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL), effective January 2026, and she will be based in Mumbai.
She takes on the mandate after serving as Vice President and Business Head of Lakmē, where she oversaw the brand’s strategy and business operations.
At Global Martech Alliance, we track leadership moves like this because they often signal how brand priorities will evolve—especially in categories where content, commerce, creators, and data now sit in the same operating system.
GMA’s mission is centered on helping marketing teams discover, evaluate, and adopt the right tools with practical, decision-ready resources—so we naturally look at what a new CMO appointment could mean for the marketing playbook behind the scenes, not just the org chart.
Leadership move in HUL’s Beauty & Wellbeing
Khaitan’s appointment places a long-tenured Unilever leader at the marketing helm of HUL’s Beauty & Wellbeing business, a portfolio that spans personal care and beauty across mass as well as premium segments.
The core headline is straightforward: a marketer with deep experience across brand building, category leadership, and global roles is now responsible for shaping how HUL’s Beauty & Wellbeing brands show up, grow, and remain culturally relevant in India.
From a brand-management viewpoint, this is a portfolio CMO role that blends three different jobs into one.
First, it’s classic brand leadership—defining what each brand stands for, and protecting distinctiveness across channels where consumer attention is fragmented.
Second, it’s growth leadership—aligning marketing with distribution realities, e-commerce acceleration, and performance discipline.
Third, it’s transformation leadership—because beauty marketing in 2026 is rarely “campaign-only”; it is an always-on engine built on content velocity, retail visibility, community building, and measurable conversion paths.
For HUL, the timing is also notable: she assumed the role in January 2026, which typically sets the tone for annual planning, agency priorities, and the year’s media/commerce calendars.
When portfolio CMOs change at the start of a year, it often creates a window to reset how marketing teams brief, measure, and execute—without losing momentum in ongoing brand cycles.
A career built across sales, brands, and global portfolios
Khaitan brings more than 19 years of experience at Unilever, spanning sales, brand management, and leadership roles across India and global markets.
This kind of career shape matters because beauty and personal care marketing rewards leaders who understand both demand generation (brand desire) and demand capture (availability, assortment, shelf/search visibility, and conversion).
In her most recent role, she led Lakmē as Vice President and Business Head, combining brand strategy with business operations.
That combination is particularly relevant for a Beauty & Wellbeing portfolio CMO because marketing decisions in beauty are tightly linked to product pipeline, channel mix, price-pack architecture, and the trade-offs between scale and premiumization.
Before Lakmē, she held global leadership positions across Unilever’s haircare and skincare portfolios.
Those roles included Global Brand Director responsibilities for Haircare, and for Fair & Lovely and Citra—giving her exposure to multi-market brand stewardship, innovation roadmaps, and the discipline of building platforms that can travel across cultures.
Earlier in her career, she managed Pond’s in South Asia as a regional brand leader and also held senior brand roles across Lakmē and Pond’s.
This matters because South Asia’s beauty consumer is not one consumer: it’s a set of micro-markets defined by climate, language, local influencers, shopping habits, and fast-moving trends—so experience navigating regional nuance becomes a competitive advantage.
Her early Unilever journey began in sales and customer excellence, before she moved into brand building and category leadership.
And prior to joining Unilever, she worked at Dabur India in sales roles, adding another layer of on-ground commercial exposure early in her career.
From a leadership-development lens, this is a “full stack marketer” profile: sales instincts, brand craft, portfolio thinking, and global perspective.
In beauty and wellbeing, that mix is valuable because the category is simultaneously emotional (identity-led) and functional (results-led), and success often requires both storytelling and scientific credibility—delivered consistently at scale.
Why this role matters for beauty marketing in 2026
Beauty & wellbeing is no longer a single market; it is a set of subcultures moving at different speeds.
You have ingredient-led communities that debate efficacy, creator-led micro trends that peak and vanish in weeks, and premium buyers who expect elevated experiences online and offline.
For large portfolios, the marketing challenge is not only to “be everywhere,” but to show up differently where it counts—without losing the brand’s core.
That’s why a portfolio CMO’s job increasingly looks like orchestration:
- Orchestrating brand narratives across mass and premium audiences without diluting distinctiveness.
- Orchestrating channel strategy across modern trade, general trade, e-commerce marketplaces, brand.com, quick commerce, and social commerce.
- Orchestrating innovation storytelling—so launches don’t just “introduce” products but earn trust and drive trial.
- Orchestrating measurement—so teams can make faster calls on creative, creator partnerships, content formats, and commerce performance.
In India specifically, beauty consumption has become far more “decision-heavy” than it used to be.
Consumers compare, screenshot, watch reviews, ask creators, read ingredient lists, and look for value signals before they buy.
That behavior raises the bar for marketing clarity: messaging has to be consistent, substantiated, and optimized for discovery across search, social, and marketplaces.
This is also where a leader with experience across Lakmē, Pond’s, haircare, and skincare can be uniquely positioned—because the portfolio CMO must understand multiple buying missions, not one.
The logic of a makeup purchase is different from a skincare regimen decision, and different again from daily personal care: each needs its own creative language, content cadence, and conversion path.
The martech lens: where strategy meets systems
GMA’s editorial lens is simple: modern marketing outcomes increasingly depend on the systems underneath the storytelling.
And Beauty & Wellbeing is one of the most system-dependent categories today because content volume is high, SKU complexity can be high, and the purchase journey spans multiple touchpoints.
Here are the martech and operating priorities a Beauty & Wellbeing CMO typically has to master—especially at a portfolio scale:
1) Content operations that can keep up
Beauty marketing is content-intensive by default—tutorials, how-tos, ingredient explainers, creator collabs, trend participation, product demos, and commerce-friendly short-form assets.
At scale, “more content” isn’t the goal; faster learning is the goal—build a machine that ships, measures, and improves creative without burning teams out.
That often means stronger workflows for briefing, approvals, compliance checks, and asset reuse across channels.
2) Creator strategy that behaves like a channel, not a one-off
The creator economy is now a performance lever and a brand lever.
The operational question shifts from “which influencer?” to “what is our creator portfolio strategy?”—mixing reach creators, credibility creators, community creators, and conversion creators.
To do that consistently, marketing teams need better creator discovery, relationship management, and measurement hygiene (so partnerships don’t become untrackable spends).
3) Commerce-first marketing without losing brand equity
Beauty brands win on desire, but they also win on frictionless buying: right PDP content, strong reviews, clear claims, the right bundle architecture, and visibility during peak demand moments.
In many companies, commerce teams and brand teams still operate in parallel; the next phase is convergence—shared planning, shared KPIs, and shared creative that works both for brand building and for conversion.
That convergence is a martech challenge as much as a marketing challenge because data, attribution, and asset governance need to align.
4) Measurement that leaders can trust
As budgets spread across platforms, leaders need a consistent view of what is working—without relying on a single platform’s reporting view.
This is where mature organizations invest in better experimentation (creative tests, geo tests where feasible), incrementality thinking, and a measurement stack that balances short-term performance with long-term brand contribution.
The point isn’t perfect measurement; it’s decision-grade measurement that improves the speed and confidence of marketing choices.
5) Customer experience as a brand moat
Premium beauty and wellbeing growth is often driven by experience: how the brand educates, how it resolves doubts, how it personalizes, and how it supports repeat purchase.
That pushes marketing closer to CRM, retention, and community—not as “supporting functions,” but as core brand-building engines.
This is why leadership appointments like Khaitan’s matter to the martech ecosystem as well.
A portfolio CMO can accelerate simplification—fewer tools that do more, clearer workflows, tighter measurement—or unintentionally create sprawl if systems evolve without governance.
The winners are usually the organizations that treat marketing technology like product infrastructure: owned, maintained, and measured for adoption—not just purchased for capability.
What marketing leaders can take from this transition
Khaitan’s move is also a useful case study for marketing leadership in 2026, especially for professionals building careers across brand, digital, and growth.
Cross-functional depth still wins.
Her path—from sales and customer excellence into brand leadership and then global portfolio roles—signals that “end-to-end understanding” remains a differentiator at senior levels.
For marketers, it’s a reminder that growth leadership often requires comfort with trade-offs: brand vs. performance, reach vs. relevance, premium vs. scale, speed vs. governance.
Global exposure can strengthen local execution.
Global roles train leaders to build frameworks, while local roles train leaders to read culture.
When both perspectives combine, marketing becomes sharper: fewer reactive decisions, more deliberate platforms, and better consistency across channels.
Portfolio marketing is a different sport.
A brand CMO can go deep; a portfolio CMO must go wide without becoming shallow.
That means building strong brand teams, clear decision rights, and a measurement language that the whole portfolio can use—otherwise the portfolio becomes a collection of disconnected plays.
The next marketing advantage is operational excellence.
In beauty, creative is essential—but operations decide whether great creative becomes repeated impact or a one-time spike.
Teams that operationalize content, creators, commerce, and measurement tend to outperform because they learn faster and scale best practices across brands.