HUL Reinstates Category CMOs to Combat Slowing Growth
- 1Hindustan Unilever is reinstating dedicated Chief Marketing Officers across personal care, home care, and foods divisions, reversing the centralised growth officer model that parent Unilever had implemented.
- 2Abhinav Ravikumar has been appointed CMO for personal care, while recruitment is underway for home care and foods marketing heads.
- 3The restructuring responds to two years of slowing sales growth driven by inflation, weak demand, and aggressive competition from niche digital-first brands.
- 4Industry analysts view this as a strategic pivot toward sharper brand differentiation and accelerated decision-making in India's rapidly digitising consumer landscape.
- 5The move signals HUL's acknowledgment that scale alone cannot sustain leadership in an era where media fragmentation and evolving consumer preferences demand category-specific marketing expertise.
FMCG giant restructures marketing leadership as digital brands chip away at market dominance.
Hindustan Unilever's decision to reinstate category-specific Chief Marketing Officers marks a pivotal moment in Indian FMCG leadership strategy. After parent company Unilever had consolidated marketing under a centralised Chief Growth and Marketing Officer model, the company is now reversing course—acknowledging that India's fragmented, hyper-competitive consumer market demands specialised marketing leadership rather than one-size-fits-all approaches. This restructuring comes at a critical juncture when HUL's growth trajectory has decelerated, and digital-native challengers are systematically eroding its category dominance.
The New Marketing Architecture
Under the restructured model, Abhinav Ravikumar assumes the CMO role for personal care, while HUL actively recruits marketing heads for home care and foods divisions. At the global level, Leandro Barreto—currently CMO of beauty and wellbeing—has been elevated to enterprise-wide CMO at Unilever while retaining his business group responsibilities. This dual-layer approach suggests Unilever recognises the need for both global strategic coherence and local market agility. For HUL, the separation of marketing leadership across categories enables deeper consumer understanding, faster go-to-market execution, and more authentic brand narratives tailored to specific consumption occasions and purchase drivers. The structure also facilitates more nimble responses to category-specific competitive threats, whether from Marico in premium personal care or Dabur in natural home care.
The Competitive Context Driving Change
HUL's restructuring isn't happening in a vacuum. The company has witnessed sales growth moderate significantly over the past two years, pressured by persistent inflation that has compressed consumer wallets, weak rural demand that shows only tentative recovery signs, and an explosion of digitally-savvy challenger brands. D2C brands like Mamaearth, The Derma Co, Minimalist, and Plum have demonstrated that consumers—particularly in metros and tier-1 cities—are willing to experiment beyond legacy FMCG brands when offered compelling value propositions around ingredients, sustainability, or personalisation. These digital-first brands operate with fundamentally different cost structures, leverage performance marketing with surgical precision, and build communities rather than just customer bases. HUL's traditional strengths—distribution muscle, brand heritage, and broadcast advertising dominance—matter less when purchase decisions increasingly happen on Instagram, YouTube product reviews, and quick commerce platforms.
From Scale Marketing to Precision Marketing
Abneesh Roy, Executive Director at Nuvama Institutional Equities, frames the shift aptly: "Under the new managing director, the company has renewed its focus on the consumer, with the role of the chief marketing officer gaining relevance as media shifts beyond traditional channels." This observation captures the fundamental transformation underway. HUL built its empire on scale marketing—mass television campaigns, extensive distribution, and portfolio breadth. But as media consumption fragments across connected TV, regional OTT platforms, short-form video, social commerce, and podcasts, the economics of broadcast marketing deteriorate. Category CMOs can develop more nuanced media strategies that reflect how personal care shoppers consume content differently from foods buyers. They can allocate budgets toward performance channels that deliver measurable ROI, invest in influencer partnerships that build credibility with specific demographics, and orchestrate omnichannel experiences that connect digital discovery with offline purchase.
R&D and Innovation as Marketing Imperatives
Crucially, Roy highlights that sharper brand differentiation requires not just marketing investment but also R&D commitment. This integration of innovation and marketing represents mature thinking about competitive advantage. Challenger brands have raised consumer expectations around ingredient transparency, formulation science, and product efficacy. Marketing alone cannot overcome product parity. Category-focused CMOs, working closely with R&D teams, can identify white spaces, validate consumer needs through rapid prototyping, and build innovation pipelines that fuel marketing narratives. Whether it's sustainable packaging for conscious consumers, Ayurvedic formulations for natural beauty seekers, or convenience formats for time-pressed urban households, the product itself must deliver the brand promise that marketing articulates.
HUL's organisational restructuring offers a masterclass in institutional humility—the willingness to acknowledge that yesterday's winning formula may not secure tomorrow's leadership. The centralised growth officer model made theoretical sense: eliminate silos, share best practices, drive efficiency. But theory collided with the reality of Indian market complexity, where a Surf Excel buyer in rural Punjab and a Dove purchaser in Bangalore represent fundamentally different consumer jobs-to-be-done. Category expertise matters. Deep consumer empathy matters. Speed matters. By reinstating CMO roles, HUL is betting that specialisation trumps centralisation when competitive intensity reaches critical levels.
What makes this move particularly significant is its timing. HUL isn't restructuring from a position of crisis but from strategic foresight. Growth has slowed, yes, but the company remains profitable and dominant. This proactive recalibration—before market share losses become existential—demonstrates sophisticated leadership. It also signals to the broader Indian marketing community that even the country's most sophisticated FMCG marketer recognises that digital transformation requires organisational transformation. Marketing structures designed for a three-channel television universe cannot effectively navigate a universe of infinite media touchpoints, real-time consumer feedback loops, and algorithmic distribution.
The reinstatement of category CMOs at HUL validates what many marketing leaders have intuited: as markets fragment and digitise, marketing leadership must become more specialised, not more generalised. The pendulum that swung toward centralisation and chief growth officer models is now swinging back toward category expertise and specialised consumer understanding. For marketing professionals, this shift creates opportunities to deepen domain knowledge, build cross-functional innovation capabilities, and demonstrate measurable business impact within defined competitive arenas. The lesson extends beyond FMCG—any organisation serving diverse customer segments through rapidly evolving media ecosystems should question whether centralised marketing structures still serve strategic objectives or merely administrative convenience.
This article is an editorial rewrite based on reporting originally published by The Economic Times. The original article has been rewritten and contextualised for India's marketing community by The Wise Marketing Desk using AI-assisted editorial tools.
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