Guest
Ibrahim Khan
Global Vice President Marketing, The Coca-Cola Company
Fifteen years from sales to consumer insights to global brand lead, Ibrahim Khan argues that marketing is the business of creativity and the product comes before the ad.
About
Ibrahim Khan is Global Vice President Marketing at The Coca-Cola Company, where he leads the global Fanta brand across what he describes as 185 countries. He is known for reframing Fanta as an entertainment brand and for building its Halloween work into a global platform, the Haunted Universe.
Khan did not start in marketing. By his own account he began his career in sales, then moved into knowledge and insights, the company's research and consumer insights function, before crossing into marketing, drawn by the balance it offered between the commercial, consumer and strategic sides of the business. Roughly 15 years on, he says, he has become a marketeer in full, having worked up through bigger brands, bigger markets and finally a global remit at a company whose portfolio he describes as made up of 32 billion dollar brands.
In his current role Khan leads Fanta, a brand he puts at 70 years old, and has spent the last three years rediscovering what it stands for and scaling its Halloween work into a repeatable global platform. He points to the Haunted Universe as the proof: built over 18 months with entertainment studio partner Grail, it ran, by his account, as a campaign in 40 markets, sold more than a billion packs and sold out in the US two weeks before Halloween. His guiding belief is that a marketer's job is to leave the brand in a slightly better place than they found it.
Career19 years
- 2023 to now The Coca-Cola Company Global Vice President Marketing, Fanta TM
- 2021 to 2023 The Coca-Cola Company Senior Marketing Director, Sparkling Flavors, Greater China & Mongolia
- 2020 to 2021 The Coca-Cola Company Senior Marketing Director Sprite, Schweppes, China
- 2018 to 2020 The Coca-Cola Company Marketing Director Sparkling ASEAN
Show earlier roles: The Coca-Cola Company, Procter and Gamble
- 2017 to 2018 The Coca-Cola Company Senior Brand Manager Coca-Cola TM Thailand
- 2015 to 2017 The Coca-Cola Company Senior Brand Manager Coca-Cola TM Pakistan & Afghanistan
- 2013 to 2015 The Coca-Cola Company Brand Manager Stills, Juices & Innovation
- 2011 to 2013 The Coca-Cola Company Jr. Brand Manager Still Beverages & Juices
- 2010 to 2011 Procter and Gamble Team Leader Consumer & Market Knowledge (CMK)
- 2009 to 2011 Procter and Gamble Consumer & Market Knowledge Manager, Personal Care
- 2007 to 2009 Procter and Gamble Sales Manager Traditional and Modern Trade
How Ibrahim thinks3 convictions
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Protect the brand's core
Khan holds that a brand's fundamental meaning should not change, only its expression. Fanta has meant delicious and fun for 70 years, and when thousands of people touch it across 185 countries, the risk is losing that core institutional knowledge. His discipline is to keep the core fixed while letting markets reinterpret the fun.
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Growth is the only KPI
For Khan, marketing exists to drive the business, full stop. He argues the function was wrongly reduced to communications during the TV era and has come full circle to product, pricing, distribution and growth. Metrics like love matter, but only insofar as they translate into repeatable, sustainable business growth.
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AI is an enabler, not the author
Khan treats AI as the next evolution of production technology, the way computer graphics once replaced hand drawing, rather than a replacement for human craft. Fanta's Halloween world used AI in some processes but still relied on Hollywood writers, illustrators and PhDs in lore. He is blunt that the idea of pressing a few buttons to generate a universe is a misperception.