Binit Kumar named head of marketing for Dabur’s health supplements, hydration and baby care business

NEW DELHI: Few marketers get to leave a category better than they found it and then get promoted for saying so. Binit Kumar has just done both. After four years running Dabur’s oral care business as its brand and profit and loss owner, Kumar is stepping into a new mandate as head of marketing for health supplements, hydration and baby care, a category shift that keeps him inside Dabur but hands him an entirely different set of brands to build.

The oral care stint was no small assignment. Kumar carried brand and P&L responsibility for a toothpaste and tooth powder business turning over Rs 1,600 crore, backed by a budget exceeding Rs 150 crore and a lean four-member team. Over four years the portfolio collected 27 awards and, more tellingly, Dabur Red Paste was named India’s most trusted toothpaste brand by the Times of India, a rare instance of an ayurvedic offering winning on trust against much bigger, more heavily marketed rivals.

The scoreboard behind that recognition reads like a masterclass in category building rather than a list of campaigns. Kumar revived the brand’s mascot for a fourth run, moving the narrative from Sabko Chabaa Jaayenge to Chabaatey Raho and threading it through cricket, food and Bollywood as entry points into consumer culture. He turned Desh Ke Laal from a one-off Independence Day film into a year-round purpose platform and podcast, honouring the armed forces and, most affectingly, the Rashtriya Bal Puraskar children. He pushed Dabur to take a scientific stand with its Switch To Fluoride Free campaign in a category that typically prefers not to pick a fight, and secured Indian Dental Association endorsement for Dabur Red, making it the only ayurvedic brand in the world to carry that seal from dentists.

There was showmanship in the mix too. The BlackForWhite campaign for Dabur Herb’l Charcoal briefly installed Darth Vader as chief innovation officer, a Star Wars-themed packaging experiment that tested whether a 140-year-old Indian company could borrow from global pop culture without losing its own identity. It worked. Meswak picked up 13 awards and double-digit growth, alongside a Guinness World Record mural and Dabur’s first NFT in 2022, while Dabur BaeFresh built salience through modern trade innovation and a Times of India freshness partnership.

None of this happened in isolation. Kumar credits the run to a talented team and, as he put it, generous mentoring, alongside every manager, teammate, cross-functional partner and agency that gave him room to experiment, cover when things went wrong, and credit when they worked. It is the kind of acknowledgement that tends to accompany a genuinely well-run innings rather than a hurried exit.

His new brief takes him to categories where Dabur itself began, in healthcare. Health supplements, hydration and baby care each meet consumers at moments that matter, building everyday resilience, replenishing what the day takes out, and caring for the most vulnerable members of a household, all powered by Ayurveda. The portfolio spans the Dabur Chyawanprash franchise, the Dabur Glucose franchise, Dabur Lal Tail and the wider Dabur baby range, and a Pure Herbs line of single-herb ayurvedic actives such as Ashwagandha and Arjuna aimed at the modern wellness seeker.

Kumar arrives at this new chapter with credentials well beyond Dabur. Across 16 years in sales and marketing at Procter & Gamble, Coty, Zydus Wellness and Dabur, he has handled brands ranging from $40 million to $200 million in turnover, spanning FMCG, B2B and B2C businesses. He is also a committed student of marketing science, trained under Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk, Mark Ritson, Rory Sutherland and Richard Shotton, and runs his own virtual CMO Conclave, which has hosted figures including Romaniuk, Becky Frayer, Phil Barden, Karen Nelson Field, Chris Lukehurst and Sorin Patilinet. That grounding in empirical marketing, rather than instinct alone, is arguably what made the oral care turnaround as measurable as it was memorable.

For Dabur, the move keeps a proven brand builder inside the tent while giving him a broader canvas across some of the group’s most emotionally resonant categories. For Kumar, it is a natural next step for someone who has spent a career treating brand building as a science as much as a craft. On this record, whichever shelf he ends up building memory structures for next is worth watching.