Career-marketer Sukhleen Aneja talks about how her FMCG marketing experience at HUL, Reckitt, and L'Oreal helped her understand a complex Indian consumer market and prepared her for her current role as CEO—brands and FMCG business at Good Glamm Group
Sukhleen Aneja believes career marketers bring an in-depth understanding of consumer trends, coupled with strong execution abilities, to leadership roles. Not too long ago, Aneja, who has two decades of experience at legacy FMCG firms, took over as the CEO to head the brands and FMCG business at the beauty and personal care unicorn Good Glamm Group. Her career file includes successful stints at Hindustan Unilever and L'Oréal Paris. Aneja's last job was at Reckitt where she was chief marketing officer of the hygiene portfolio across South Asia.
When we caught up with Aneja for our series 'Marketers To Leaders: Journeys to the corner office', she told us, “People with a sales and marketing background come with a balance of creating a roadmap for the future along with execution abilities." Even traditional companies, both in India and globally, have a large number of career-marketing folks who are leading organisations as CEOs. To that extent, this is a universal trend. However, said Aneja, “where startups become fantastic is that they can take early bets on people, which allows people to flourish much sooner. By design, startups are risk-taking so, within the organisation, they are taking risks on people.”
Beauty and personal care brands under the Good Glamm Group include MyGlamm, The Moms Co, St Botanica, and Sirona, besides content platforms POPxo, Scoopwhoop, and BabyChakra. It also launched "the largest creator ecosystem"— The Good Creator Co. (GCC), under which it has consolidated all its existing and acquired businesses focused on content creation and influencer marketing. These include Plixxo, MissMalini, Winkl and Vidooly.
In an exclusive interaction with Storyboard18, Aneja talked about new-age companies taking bigger risks with their talent, what made her join the startup, challenges faced by marketers transitioning to business roles and why beauty remains a highly under-leveraged category online.
Edited excerpts.