When consumers have a question about skincare or haircare today, the first answer may not come from a dermatologist or a beauty aisle. It could come from Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini. This evolution says something important about how personal care marketing is changing—the battle is no longer simply for attention, but for credibility at every point where consumers seek information. As consumers become more ingredient-conscious, research-driven and sceptical of easy claims, brands are re-evaluating not just what they say, but where, when and how they say it.
For Sebamed India, this presents an interesting intersection between an established brand strength and a new consumer behaviour. The brand recently became one of the early players to experiment with advertising on ChatGPT, making conversational AI an interesting new frontier for a brand whose proposition has long been rooted in science.
For Pranay Rao, VP - Marketing, Consumer and Personal Care, USV Limited, this convergence between science, search and AI is particularly relevant because consumers are increasingly using AI as a validation layer. “A few days ago, we were speaking to someone who decided to buy a particular product because of a certain ingredient. We asked her how she found out about it, and she said she had discovered it through influencers, but had also discussed it with ChatGPT,” Rao shares, adding that while today’s consumers may discover products through friends or influencers, there is always a re-check through AI.
Sebamed’s decades of accumulated scientific evidence gives it an advantage in that environment. “AI generally already picks it up,” he says, pointing to the brand’s clinical studies and research that have created a body of resident knowledge.
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That science-first approach also shapes Sebamed India’s recent communication, including its 'Hair Fall ≠ Hair Loss' campaign. Consumer conversations revealed confusion between breakage and hair loss, alongside scepticism created by exaggerated category claims. The answer, Rao says, was to educate rather than simply sell.
But science alone cannot win the scroll. “Speaking pure science might sometimes bore people,” he admits. The brand therefore builds creative hooks around its scientific proposition, tests assets rigorously and creates multiple executions for different consumer touchpoints.
The traditional ‘big campaign’, Rao believes, is also giving way to a more fragmented model. While large FMCG companies can still rely on it, largely, he says, “The big ad will no longer exist in its current form. What you might see more and more is that one big ad will act as a totem pole around which you will launch the campaign. But you need many smaller executions, including influencer activations, e-commerce activations and so on.”
Creators are central to that shift, but Rao sees a paradox. They bring relatability and trust, yet overexposure can make endorsements feel manufactured. “There needs to be a balance where you are incorporating it tactfully, but it should not be or look fake. When we collaborate with creators, we don’t script it out. We give them a product and its benefits, and we tell them to run it the way they feel better. We've seen that work for us. But we are still more traditional FMCG than a D2C creator-led brand; the latter is doing a good job when it comes to creator marketing,” Rao notes.
The larger challenge for the brand is to combine the agility of D2C with the scale and discipline of FMCG. “We soon will have a hybrid way where the organisation has to learn both,” Rao says. For Sebamed, the marketing focus therefore is less about choosing between science, creativity, AI, creators or scale—and more about making all of them work together without losing the credibility at the heart of the brand.
