One of the initiatives launched by our former Community Board Observer, @RohitPakalapati was to begin the “CBO interviews” series, giving you an inside look into the people at Nothing, and what they’re doing behind the scenes, in areas you may not even think about! This series is something I really enjoyed reading, and looked forward to continuing as your 2025 CBO.

I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Hollie Bishop, Director of Global Growth Marketing at Nothing to understand exactly what Growth Marketing is and how Nothing markets themselves in a competitive tech landscape.

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Adam: Thank you for taking the time today! I’d like to help the community better understand who you are - could you please start with introducing yourself and what your role is?

Hollie: I’m Hollie Bishop, Global Growth Marketing Director at Nothing. What do I look after? What don’t I look after nowadays is a fun question. I look after global products and campaign marketing, paid media, CRM, e-commerce and research and insight, and have a brilliant team!

Adam: Great! Could you tell us a little about what Growth Marketing is and what you get involved with on a daily basis?

Hollie: In every business, Growth Marketing has kind of a different definition. At Nothing, it’s about cost efficient and attention grabbing ways to grow the brand. We as a business do not have the privilege of piles and piles of cash to buy attention. We have to capture attention by being interesting and actually delivering things to our consumers that they want. While we invest in search advertising and digital performance, those are hygiene factors. Our broader marketing efforts set the stage for those investments to be effective.

Adam: And where does Growth Marketing sit within Nothing? Are there separate teams that deal with different aspects of marketing?

Hollie: In my belief, Growth Marketing is a mantra - it’s a way of approaching marketing. Some companies have Growth Marketers or Growth Hackers, and their job is to seek new avenues of revenue. From a performance marketing point of view, it could be looking at keyword bidding strategies of competitors and seeing how this competitor doesn’t bid on this keyword, but it gets 20,000 searches a month. Let’s double down on that, because we can actually own that keyword search. So it could be ‘blue beautiful phones’, and we could own that search term. It can be broader than that. It could involve anticipating a competitor’s moves and hijacking attention. And that doesn’t stem from one channel or one specialism. It’s a mindset that might actually take multiple channels to be effective. When you think about traditional Growth Marketing, it’s usually A/B tested or very data centric to make the decisions. But actually you can be very creative with the approach.

Adam: Nothing has a very distinct brand identity, how do you align Growth Marketing strategies with this?

Hollie: We have quite a clear brand identity. It’s really lovely that most times you can see if something has been touched by Nothing. Whether it’s an ad, email, or product that you see, you can usually tell straight away that it’s come from the Nothing Design & creative teams, which we’re quite intentional about.

We could chase easy money, but we prioritise brand integrity. We have quite heated conversations about, should we pursue that? We could pursue it, but it could damage our brand. At the end of the day, we want to ensure that the experience of Nothing, no matter how it is experienced, online, offline, through any measure, feels true to us. We stand quite strong in our beliefs of protecting our vision and that means we sometimes pass on easy money.

Adam: Coming back to you personally, you worked in marketing lifestyle and luxury brands before joining Nothing. Could you tell us how you came to work at Nothing, what drew you in, and how you transitioned to Nothing?

Hollie: I’ve known about Nothing for a while. My partner was a tech journalist for a long time. And because of that, I have lots of friends that work in the tech space, and I always found Nothing interesting. So when the role came up, I was like, yeah, that’s somewhere I want to be. As you said, I’ve worked in fashion and beauty. I think that understanding multiple different industries makes you a better marketer - it’s really important to have experience of different worlds and understand how different consumers think and what consumers want. At the end of the day, people want to have fun when they interact with your brand, no matter what it is. Fun at Jo Malone, was obviously different to the fun of Nothing, but you adapt to what your consumer wants. The foundation of understanding marketing is usually quite similar, no matter what you’re promoting.

So then the role came around. Thankfully, the business and Carl were willing to have someone that was from a luxury fashion house because he’s inspired by those brands and that luxury experience. And we at Nothing essentially make really beautiful products that are a great price, but feel a lot more expensive than the price point. And that’s important to our DNA.

Adam: Since joining Nothing, what would you say one of your biggest challenges has been?

Hollie: For us it’s the pace but also making sure that we are delivering what people want. We talk about marketing at the pace of culture, and culture moves quickly. Sometimes our concepts are last minute to make sure that they are culturally relevant. Some brands plan their marketing strategy months ahead, but we stay agile. A celebrity relevant in March might be out of the spotlight by August. We’re a small but mighty team, and it’s so essential that we listen to each other and make sure that we’re doing stuff for the greater good. And yeah, the way to manage intensity is to really value your weekends!

Adam: You mentioned understanding what people want. Obviously, Nothing’s created somewhat of a loyal fan base already - what marketing tactics have you found most effective in building and maintaining customer loyalty while also enticing new customers?

Hollie: We’ve barely scratched the surface of where we can be - we have our amazing community, but there’s so much more, so many more people like our community out there that have not gotten to know us yet. Our highly engaged audiences, for example, our community, enjoy our original content and deep dives, and we want to continue to keep doing those things. Our low engaged audiences are drawn in by our design and our elevated appeal. The key is maintaining authenticity with our core community while scaling elements that attract broader audiences. Our engaged fans keep us humble, and you keep us on track, we’re doing it for the people that keep us going.

Adam: Thanks for explaining! How does the marketing team utilise existing customer feedback to drive decision making for growth strategies?

Hollie: Our insights lead, Manny, actively gathers feedback from our community, Reddit, and search data, to name a few. He loves an opinion, because that’s what he’s there for, to listen! Everything informs our work; from product colours to advertising styles. It’s important to understand what customers in each market react to - we know that in Southeast Asia, consumers love more colorful products and colorful advertising. We always listen, even just a week after a product launch, we consolidate feedback and talk to our product and ID team about future developments.

Adam: That makes sense. I was going to ask about how marketing collaborates with the design team. Obviously, you mentioned colors.

Hollie: Sometimes we’re their worst nightmare, sometimes we’re their best friends. They’ll come to us with something they want to try and we’ll do research on product viability, whether a feature is something that customers care about or just a gimmick. I could give you an exact example, but the product’s not here yet, so I can’t…

Adam: People don’t think about the work that goes into research. You can design a product, but it’s how the community is actually going to receive it - you need to be able to anticipate that before a product is designed and funded in the first place.

Hollie: To be honest, we do. Sometimes we have to make decisions we know that our community might not be 100% happy with. Some decisions have to be made because of our size of business. One big one is always talking about smaller phones. Personally, I have smaller hands, so maybe I would want a smaller phone. But market analysis shows it’s not going to sell to the volume that we need to deliver. We have to wait until we’re more mature as a business to explore those options.

Adam: You mentioned different types of marketing that attract different regions. I’ve seen in India, for example, they’ve often got celebrities repping the phones, whereas the rest of the world don’t. How do you tailor marketing to different regions?

Hollie: When you’re in a global role, there’s a level of respect for the localisation. We allow local markets flexibility while maintaining global consistency. India, for example, has a unique marketing landscape. There, we have a brand ambassador, but that approach wouldn’t work everywhere. Like you said, the posters in London, they’re beautiful models, but they’re not recognisable people. We set a global creative platform, then local teams build from it. For instance, our global tagline for the Phone (3a) Series is Power in Perspective, while in India, it’s Get Closer. They’re both communicating the power of our evolution in terms of our camera development, but suit different cultural preferences.

Adam: There’s a lot of competition out there, and the tech landscape is constantly evolving. How do you ensure you stay at the head of the curve, and adapt your marketing strategies to stay competitive?

Hollie: I didn’t realise how competitive the smartphone industry was until I joined. We have an authority in spaces that other competitors can never go into. Our community-driven approach is authentic in a way competitors can’t replicate. If a big brand tried to do a community update video like us, it would feel forced, like that meme with Steve Buscemi, where he’s dressed up as a high schooler and he’s like, “how do you do, fellow kids”. It’s not true to them. We recognise when competitors copy us, so we innovate. We see some competitors are copying the style of our KSP videos. So we’re going to change how we do our KSP videos - so we are constantly keeping an eye out, but not letting competitors take us away from our path. If you start looking everywhere, you end up losing sight of yourself.

Adam: I guess that’s a tricky balance, pivoting into something that you’ve not tried before, anticipating how the community is going to react to that, seeing what works and what doesn’t.

Hollie: I’m sure that you see some of our videos, and you’re like, “not my favourite”, which is fine. We look at the numbers and see that X clearly wasn’t one that landed as much as we wanted to, but Y landed really well, so let’s do more like Y. That’s not just in original content but in many areas of the business - we always reflect and evolve.

Adam: I heard recently that Nothing will be taking over key locations with big Phone (3a) Series ads, could you tell us about that?

Hollie: The Phone (3a) Series has been a fun one. We’ve done some things that we’ve not tried before, so over the next month, we have some take-overs across Soho and key areas of London where we know potential consumers can be. We’re investing and trialing different kinds of content types. The team has done some really great work and worked really hard to try some new stuff and get more people to know about what we’re doing, because that’s the challenge for us, is breaking through the noise. Growth Marketing can be very technical and scientific!

Adam: Could you tell us about something coming up in Nothing’s Growth Marketing that you’re particularly excited about?

Hollie: We’ve got a really busy year! People have been waiting for what’s coming, and we hope we won’t disappoint. We’re building on what works, for example the Key Beats (moments in a lead up to a launch), while introducing fresh elements to keep people excited about Nothing; trying to develop and excite people about the brand that, like the community, already understands what an exciting thing we’re doing, what Nothing represents and continues to be a market challenger. There’s a lot in the pipeline. I wish I could say more, but all I can say is that we’ll be having fun.

Adam: Thanks for taking the time, Hollie! Any final words?

Hollie: The main takeaway of this is: we’re trying to think differently, so please keep the team honest and give us your feedback. Ideas can come from everywhere and anywhere. Tip: digest culture, scrolling online and in person.

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I hope enjoyed reading this interview and that you’ve learnt a lot about Nothing’s Growth Marketing! If you still have outstanding questions, pop them below, and Hollie may pick her favourites to answer.

I look forward to joining you next time for more exciting CBO interviews!