Before Drew Panayiotou learned Python, ran an advertising agency, helped shape Disney's MagicBand and returned to the beverage company where he had once managed Canada Dry, there was Fairy Liquid. His mother used the British brand name for dishwashing detergent even after the family was living in New York. She had brought the words with her from London. To a child noticing how an ordinary product could cross an ocean and settle into family language, this was a small astonishment.
Panayiotou has described himself as an immigrant kid who wanted to feel that he mattered. Brands offered a peculiar route toward that feeling. They lived at an intimate scale, beside the sink or on the dinner table, while also passing through millions of other homes. If he could work on an iconic one, he thought, he could touch daily life at a remarkable distance.
It is an explanation for a résumé that otherwise reads like a guided tour through the modern consumer economy. Johnson & Johnson. Dr Pepper 7-Up. Kodak. Hershey. Coca-Cola. Disney. Best Buy. BBDO. Chick-fil-A. Google. Pfizer. Then, in 2024, Keurig Dr Pepper - a return to the same corporate family where he had worked in the 1990s, now with a far larger desk and more than 125 brands in view.
Chapter one / The return trip
A career comes back to the cooler
In his first turn at Dr Pepper 7-Up, Panayiotou was a brand manager for Canada Dry. He left beverages and spent the next two decades learning how a theme park removes friction, how a big-box retailer survives digital commerce, how an agency's creative people respond to a client, and how a technology company earns faith through working software. When he came back, first as CMO of U.S. Refreshment Beverages and later as Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer, he could see the category with both familiarity and borrowed eyes.
The return also clarified a lesson his younger self had not weighted heavily enough: category matters. Panayiotou likes beverages because they ask for both halves of the brain. There is manufacturing, distribution, price and retail performance. There is also taste, memory, locality and the fizzing theatre of opening a cold can. Vernors has a generational following in Michigan. Big Red occupies its own patch of San Antonio culture. Dr Pepper has spent years building a fictional college-football town called Fansville. The spreadsheet and the story keep bumping into each other.
“The thing that I wish I knew back then is that marketers have to have passion, I believe, for the category that they play in.”Drew Panayiotou
That observation is more useful than standard career arithmetic. Title, remit and compensation are visible from outside. Affection for the raw material is harder to see, yet it determines whether repetition becomes mastery or merely another calendar invite. Panayiotou tried retail, entertainment, technology and the agency business. Returning to drinks was not a retreat. It was the discovery that fun can be a serious operating advantage.
Chapter two / Learning the other language
The CMO who opened a GitHub account
At Google, marketing prestige carried limited weight in rooms full of software engineers and data scientists. Panayiotou heard the challenge plainly: how can you help if you do not understand the work? His response was delightfully literal. Already a senior executive, he enrolled at General Assembly, learned to code, opened a GitHub account and started building models in Python.
He calls Google his second MBA. The phrase is revealing because his first MBA came from Duke's Fuqua School of Business, where he was a Fuqua Scholar after completing his undergraduate degree at Boston College. The second was less about credentials and more about becoming conversational in a new source of power. Code gave him credibility with product teams, but its lasting effect was to widen his picture of the marketing job.
A CMO once worried about the media plan. Panayiotou now talks with IT leaders about clean rooms, de-identified datasets and computing capacity. If KDP wants to combine fan signals from Disney with Dr Pepper audiences around college football, the creative ambition depends on infrastructure. Someone has to explain why the cloud arrangement belongs in a story about brand building. His modern CMO is part translator, part coalition builder, part custodian of taste.
Technology has not made him less sentimental about creativity. His own maxim is that innovation without creative vision is like a tree falling unheard in a forest. Data can reveal the audience, sharpen the opening seconds and multiply versions of an idea. It cannot supply the reason a person should care. The algorithm gets a seat at the table, but it does not get to order for everyone.
Chapter three / Fans over funnels
Marketing's new F-word
Panayiotou's favorite shape is no longer the funnel. Funnels assume an orderly descent from awareness to consideration to purchase. People do not behave so politely. They watch a football game while messaging friends, notice an athlete's post, remember a flavor from childhood, see a joke on TikTok and buy whatever is cold at the petrol station. The causes spin around the purchase. His preferred shape is a flywheel.
The raving-fan flywheel
A small, invested core creates motion that paid media alone cannot manufacture.
At the center are what he calls raving fans: people who advocate, create content and recruit others because they genuinely care. They are not rented influencers. They are the person wearing the T-shirt, posting the flavor ranking or carrying a local brand ritual into the next generation. Panayiotou argues that this minority deserves disproportionate investment because its enthusiasm supplies the wheel's motion.
The philosophy does not excuse soft commercial thinking. He is blunt that a public-company CMO must drive revenue and show results. In 2025, speaking about advertising measurement, he punctured the fantasy that every dollar can be traced to the penny across fragmented platforms. KDP may feel confident within a range, he said, but certainty remains elusive. The answer is to improve the evidence without pretending the parts that resist measurement do not exist.
“You can talk to people and you can theorize and you can do nice presentations, but nothing is better than ‘Show me.’”Drew Panayiotou
His personalization thesis follows the same balance. Too many systems race toward the buy button. Panayiotou starts with a simpler courtesy: make the person's time more valuable. An Alabama fan may deserve a different first three seconds of a Fansville message than a Texas fan. The brand idea stays coherent; the invitation changes. Relevance becomes hospitality rather than pursuit.
Chapter four / The ten-degree turn
Patience, with a receipt
One of Panayiotou's less celebrated stops was Kodak, and he brings it up precisely because of what went wrong. The company possessed important digital-camera technology, yet early versions that failed to catch on made it easy to conclude that consumers did not want digital photography. The need was real. The expression was not ready.
His lesson is not to keep every weak idea alive. It is to distinguish a dead end from a concept that needs a ten-degree turn. Today, feedback arrives faster. Panayiotou tells his team to enter the “Reddit tunnels,” where product opinion is unfiltered and occasionally impolite. Direct-to-consumer releases can put an idea into the wild before a national rollout. A team can listen, adjust the form factor or the language, and find the breakthrough hiding inside an awkward first draft.
That appetite for evolution is visible in 7UP's 2026 reinvention. KDP moved lime to the front of both the formula and the name, refreshed the visual identity and made the brand's first major change in more than 15 years. Panayiotou's defense was characteristically unsentimental: an established brand's larger danger is stagnation. Heritage is an asset only if someone keeps it moving.
The same is true of his career. A brand manager became a retailer, agency chief, incubator president, technology student and global CMO before returning to the cooler. Each role added a tool, but the childhood observation survived them all. A brand becomes valuable when it earns a durable place in somebody's life. The machinery around that idea is newer, faster and thick with data. The human wish underneath it remains wonderfully old: make something worth remembering, then give people a reason to pass it on.