Sugatha Karthikeyan Joins Haleon As Region Head For The West
Sugatha Karthikeyan has joined Haleon as region head for the west, leaving Hindustan Unilever after a career of eleven years there.
- New role: region head, west, at Haleon, from September 2026
- Previously: consumer cluster head for Delhi NCR at Hindustan Unilever, from April 2023
- At HUL since: September 2015, starting as area sales and customer manager for the Greater Chennai area
- Also at HUL: marketing manager for Bru, from October 2020 to April 2023
- Before HUL: over two years at Airtel, joining as a young leader management trainee
The Scale Behind The Region Head Appointment
Her most recent brief at Hindustan Unilever was a cluster job rather than a brand one. She began with six managers and a field force of 47, and the remit expanded to seven managers, 61 field-force members and 160 distributors across Delhi NCR and Rajasthan.
The combined clusters accounted for annual sales of roughly Rs 6,000 crore. That is the number that makes this a lateral move into a comparable seat rather than a step up in title alone, and it is the sort of distributor-facing experience a consumer health business needs in a market where the chemist counter and the general trade store are still where the category is won.
The Marketing Half Of The Record
Between the two sales roles sat two and a half years as marketing manager for Bru, where she oversaw launches including Beaten Coffee, Gold and Instant Decoction, and ran brand communication campaigns across north and south India.
A career that alternates between running a sales cluster and running a brand is unusual, and it is the combination that tends to matter most in consumer health, where a claim has to survive both a regulator and a retailer. Karthikeyan holds an MBA in marketing from IIM Indore and a degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra. More appointments.
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