Marketing is the business of creativity, not a communications function. The product comes before the ad. And audiences, not brands, now hold the mic.

Khan started in sales, not marketing, then spent time in knowledge and insights, the research and consumer insights function, before moving across. What drew him in was the balance between the commercial, consumer and strategic sides of the business, the chance to do big things with good people, and the fulfilment of work that has an impact. At a company like Coke, he says, the opportunity is vast, giant heritage brands all over the world, and before you know it 15 years have passed and you have become a marketeer.

Early on you focus on the operational and executional. With scale you develop a deep respect for the fundamentals, the product, the brand, the four Ps, and an appreciation for how one brand expresses itself across cultures. Above all, he says, there is a lesson in humility: maybe you don't have all the answers, and maybe there is never just one right answer.

Khan separates people knowing a brand from people caring about it. Fanta's heritage means generations have grown up with it, so salience is high, but that doesn't disappear because a new manager arrives, which is why you have to understand where the brand began. He reads meaning through trackers and surveys, but also through the instinctive signal when millions respond to a program like Halloween. He holds a strong view: the people who built these brands were much smarter than today's marketers give them credit for.

For 70 years Fanta has meant one thing, a soft drink a little more delicious than the alternatives, the one you have when you are having fun. Khan insists you cannot change what a brand fundamentally means, only how it expresses that. It is delicious and it is fun, nothing more complicated than that.

The core, delicious and fun anchored on orange, must hold everywhere, because there is no global consumer, only a hypothetical one. But the expression changes: fun today takes the shape of entertainment, making Fanta, in his framing, an entertainment brand and a gateway to younger consumers. What entertainment means in the Philippines differs from the UAE or the USA, and that is where teams get freedom to stay culturally relevant and break through the clutter.

Fanta ran Halloween at a market level for a decade before scaling it globally over the last three years. The turning point came when people stopped asking whether Fanta would do Halloween and started asking what it would do. So Khan decided it had to be built, invested in and sustained, a platform that compounds over decades, with the explicit ambition that Halloween becomes to Fanta what Christmas is to Coke. The team studied the festivity's semiotics and archetypes, borrowed from the Coke Santa playbook, and spent 18 months designing its own haunted universe.

Khan frames the job simply: leave these brands in a slightly better place than you found them. The hope is that 20 years from now a Fanta brand manager looks at Halloween and says it was a really good decision, then builds on it, the way marketers today talk about Coke and Christmas.

With borrowed characters there is always a risk people remember the character and forget the brand. Khan's answer is a deceptively simple idea: it is so delicious even the dead crave it, because Halloween is when your deepest cravings come back to life. That keeps Fanta's deliciousness and fun at the heart of every experience, with the universe, the IP and the collaborations all in service of the brand. The heart of the program is the product, the pack and the collection: a limited time flavour, a collectible takeover, retail theatre and a connected pack experience unlocked by scanning.

In rediscovering the brand, Khan kept being asked what kind of brand Fanta is, and when people pitched lifestyle photography he doubted anyone imagines walking down a high street holding a can. The realisation was that if you are delicious and fun, you are really in the business of entertainment. There is a big overlap between fans of entertainment IP and fans of the brand, so when Fanta does what it uniquely has the skill to do, resonance is high and partners gain value too.

Khan's team has one KPI above all else, the business, because that is why marketing exists. He argues marketing was miscast as a communications function during the TV era, a brief blip, and has come full circle to product, pricing, advertising, brand, distribution and business. Growth is the main KPI, with equity, penetration and perception feeding it. He cites his CMO Manolo: the industry has long measured love, which is good, but love does not always translate into business, and the job is to turn it into repeatable, sustainable growth.

Three tests decide whether Khan backs a creative idea: does it solve a real business challenge, will it get noticed, and can we execute it, because an idea is only as good as its execution. Launching an entertainment universe is not a small thing, but Grail's proof of concept blew the team away, and what struck them most was that such a thing could be executed at all in this day and age.

Traditional advertising still has a role, Khan says, but a changed one versus the last 10 or 20 years. When he grew up, lives revolved around the TV, giving marketers a megaphone that could move a brand through one 30 second act, which made the function lazy. That role has moved to TikTok and Instagram Reels, where audiences hold the mic, not brands. So the best chance of being noticed is getting people to talk about the brand, which means doing something meaningful with the product first. The starting point goes back to your product, not your ad.

Within marketing, Khan treats AI as a tool like any other: use it well and it makes the work better and faster, ignore it and you get left behind. Halloween took no less human effort than any other year, but AI in some production processes let the team build the world, the way computer graphics once unlocked the entertainment worlds hand drawing never could. Human creativity, judgment and taste have not gone anywhere. Grail brought Hollywood writers and well known illustrators, the first Fanta comic book came from a renowned illustrator, and the lore was researched by PhDs. The idea that someone presses a few buttons and the Haunted Universe pops out is just not how it works.

Khan admits he cannot see that far, his headlines don't work that far ahead, but his frame is constant: brands like his are always fighting irrelevance, and not only against their own category, in an increasingly overstimulated world. The brands that still mean something will be the ones that find ways to cut through and stay relevant in strategically correct ways. Getting noticed for the sake of getting noticed, he warns, is not an objective either.