An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Every brand experience with your audience is an opportunity to reinforce or undermine your brand. If you surprise and delight at every opportunity people will talk about you. Word of mouth is the most powerful advocate you have.
As part of our series about how to create a trusted, believable, and beloved brand, I had the pleasure to Interview Adam Boita.
Adam Boita is Chief Marketing Officer at Ecologi, the UK’s leading climate action platform which is helping businesses and individuals to play their part in tackling climate change. With over 17 years of experience in brand marketing at iconic technology, entertainment, and lifestyle brands, Adam joined Ecologi in early 2022. Since its inception in 2019, Ecologi has planted over 53 million trees and avoided over 2.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) from the atmosphere.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I’ve worked across a broad set of industries to date from gaming, alcohol, government and now green tech. I started off my career at PlayStation working across both the brand and software divisions launching PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Network. I then changed industries to work at Pernod Ricard on ABSOLUT vodka as well as many other brands in their portfolio including Jameson, Beefeater, Plymouth, Havana Club, Malibu to name but a few. It was my work on ABSOLUT and our limited edition bottle supporting the LGBTQ+ community that opened up the door to more purpose-driven marketing. This led me to then work for NCS (National Citizen Service), the UK’s leading youth programme for 15–16 year olds, ensuring they get the life skills they don’t teach in school. 600,000 teens benefitted from that programme. Whilst there I also launched a sustainable bag brand on Kickstarter as a side hustle which opened up the world of sustainability. A friend and co-founder of Ecologi got in touch, which then led to some consultancy for Ecologi which turned into a full time job at Ecologi as CMO. When I look back I like to think that at PlayStation I entertained a generation, at ABSOLUT I helped them party, at NCS I prepared a generation for adulthood and now I’m helping to protect our planet for future generations.
Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I’m not sure about funny mistakes but the craziest / funniest moment in my career was promoting a PlayStation game called SingStar ending up dancing and singing on stage with Vanilla Ice at Glastonbury. The lesson learned is you never know where your career can take you, enjoy these moments off the back of hard work.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
As a founder-led business Ecologi was born out of asking ‘What if?’. Our CEO Elliot asked himself, what if I put the money from my morning coffee into climate action? The cup of coffee that led to funding over 53 million trees and 38,000 members. It’s a human story that people can connect to instantly. Ecologi makes people feel and see how easy and rewarding it is to take climate action. It creates a sense of momentum that other people can get behind — the power of collective action.
Trust and transparency is at the very core of our fundamentals — we publicise our financial information, customer revenue data, impact data, and our board meeting minutes. This has made us one the top 5% of B Corps globally in 2022 for Environment and Governance. Ecologi not only helps to fund a range of climate solutions, from reforestation to renewables, but we also maintain that we only support those carbon-reduction projects that are certified at the very highest level by the Gold Standard or the Verified Carbon Standard.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Next year we are launching Ecologi Zero, a game changer in Net Zero. We remove the barriers to Net Zero by enabling businesses to calculate their emissions for free. Our easy-to-use dashboard gives businesses a thorough understanding of their footprint, automatically measures and tracks emissions, and helps them to take climate action on their way to achieving net-zero. It connects to common accounting software allowing businesses to analyse their entire supply chain — which often accounts for 90% or more of emissions. Over 2,000 businesses are already signed up on the waitlist and are currently being onboarded as part of our open beta.
Ok let’s now jump to the core part of our interview. In a nutshell, how would you define the difference between brand marketing (branding) and product marketing (advertising)? Can you explain?
Brand marketing is all about design, consistency, and the experience of creating an emotional connection with people. It has a long-term duration of effect and if done well is highly memorable. Brand marketing is broadly targeted to reach all potential buyers and influencers and creates mental availability & consideration. It will influence future sales and makes next year’s product targets easier to achieve.
Product marketing is more short-term with more behavioral prompts to act now and is less memorable. It’s tightly targeted to people likely to buy very soon. It exploits brand building and the mental availability and consideration already built up.
The two have to work hand in hand and the split between the two is very important depending on what industry you’re in as per Les Binet and Peter Fields research into the ratio between brand building and activation.
Can you explain to our readers why it is important to invest resources and energy into building a brand, in addition to the general marketing and advertising efforts?
Your brand is your differentiator in the market versus the competition. It reinforces everything you stand for. If you have a strong brand then it makes the more general advertising efforts much more effective.
Can you share 5 strategies that a company should be doing to build a trusted and believable brand? Please tell us a story or example for each.
- One red thread
A single brand idea will help tie all touchpoints together, so brand consistency creates cumulative positive benefits.
2. Everyone owns the brand
The brand does not sit within a specific department. Everyone is a brand ambassador who needs to live and breathe the brand on a daily basis
3. Authenticity and transparency
No brand will be trusted from the get-go, you have to earn it. Back up words with meaningful, long-term actions that are consistent, day in, day out.
4. Be more human
We are all people. Talk to people like people. Mistakes will be made, especially if a business is in its early stages. It is better to own up to the mistakes made and engage on a human level on how you can do better moving forward.
5. Word of Mouth
Every brand experience with your audience is an opportunity to reinforce or undermine your brand. If you surprise and delight at every opportunity people will talk about you. Word of mouth is the most powerful advocate you have.
In your opinion, what is an example of a company that has done a fantastic job building a believable and beloved brand. What specifically impresses you? What can one do to replicate that?
All birds. The company unapologetically marches to the beat of their own drum. A small sneaker company started by two people with no experience in footwear is a great story. It’s a human story that people can connect to.
- They gave people something different than Nike and Adidas and took a stand on a key issue, sustainability, dubbing themselves ‘the most comfortable shoes in the world made from sustainable wool’.
- They focused on brand marketing, cultivating a following of people interested in their shoes and their eco-friendly lifestyle with a brand rallying cry their future community could get behind #weareallbirds.
- They spoke to and listened to their community to improve their shoes.
- Their content is consistent, fun and engaging, and they don’t take themselves too seriously.
- They don’t do deals and increased their prices for Black Friday by $1 pledging to match every extra dollar they earned during Black Friday, and donate the extra proceeds to support Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement to combat climate change.
In advertising, one generally measures success by the number of sales. How does one measure the success of a brand building campaign? Is it similar, is it different?
Brand-building campaigns work hand in hand and make sales activations more effective. It’s been proven time and time again. Brand building is measured by share of voice, awareness, and impact statements, as well as engagement and helps, drive healthy long term sales revenue
What role does social media play in your branding efforts?
Social media does play a huge role — particularly for a startup to scale up like us, as it offers everything in one place from brand building and activation, to ongoing community engagement. Like all media, it is only one channel and needs to be part of an integrated media strategy to ensure you are reaching people at multiple touchpoints.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I’m in the movement I want to be in. Climate change is the single biggest threat humanity faces and communicating that to make people and businesses take action is literally a once-in-a-lifetime brief for a brand marketer.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I recently watched ‘Stutz’ on Netflix where Johan Hill turns the tables on his therapist. He talks about the three realities of life — pain, uncertainty, and the need for constant work. We all have to face these 3 things no matter who we are or how famous someone is — if you can learn to live with them, accept them, then I think life is just so much easier, it’s certainly allowed me to cherish and live in the moment more.
We are blessed that very prominent leaders in business and entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world with whom you would like to have lunch or breakfast with? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Sir Richard Branson. He’s been consistently the best brand builder. Himself.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
You can find me on LinkedIn, feel free to get in touch!
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
Adam Boita Of Ecologi: Five Things You Need To Build A Trusted And Beloved Brand was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
