MAM
Afshana Khaisar rises to category brand manager at Britannia Industries, Dubai
Afshana Khaisar has spent over a decade turning consumer insight into commercial results across FMCG, and her career reads like a case study in how brands actually get built
DUBAI: Marketing careers are littered with people who talk a good game about consumer insight without ever having to defend a P&L. Afshana Khaisar is not one of them. Her trajectory, from a trade marketing internship at Al Safi Danone to her current post as category brand manager at Britannia Industries in Dubai, is a study in how strategy, creativity and hard commercial discipline actually combine to build brands that stick.
The Britannia chapter alone makes the case. As assistant brand manager marketing for three and a half years before her promotion, Khaisar ran full brand P&L, balancing topline growth against profitability while stitching together above-the-line and below-the-line campaigns into something that behaved like a single coherent story across touchpoints. She led new product development end to end, from concept through to launch, and used retail audit data to sniff out SKU, channel and geography opportunities that others might have missed. That is not glamorous work, but it is the sort of unglamorous work that keeps a portfolio growing.
Her earlier stints read like a tour of FMCG’s toughest markets. At Johnson & Johnson, running category management for Acuvue across the GCC and South Africa, she delivered a 39 per cent increase in new-wearer sales within three months, no small feat in a region where contact lens brand loyalty is notoriously hard won. At AATCO Food Industries, a Scratch & Win promotion in Carrefour hypermarkets drove a 27 per cent jump in quarterly export sales across six markets. At World Wide Traders, managing global toy brands from VTech to Ferrari across the GCC, she secured approval for a self-proposed digital media initiative that generated an additional $5.9m in net revenue, and played a role in a $30m turnaround of the toys division.
What threads through all of it is a comfort with ambiguity that FMCG demands and rarely rewards visibly. Khaisar has launched products from Kalleh UHT milk in the Gulf to Danone’s yogurt lines in Saudi Arabia, rationalised SKU portfolios while striking major supply deals, and built relationships across sales, supply chain, design and commercial teams to get ideas from concept to shelf. That cross-functional fluency, as much as any single campaign, is what separates marketers who ship results from those who merely present decks.
Her own description of the work, balancing data-driven thinking with bold, consumer-first storytelling, is not just careful phrasing. The record backs it up: market share growth at Britannia, new-wearer surges at Acuvue, export spikes at AATCO, and a toy division turnaround worth tens of millions of dollars. In an industry increasingly obsessed with digital dashboards, Khaisar’s career is a reminder that brand building still comes down to reading a market correctly and then having the operational grit to act on it.
