Welcome to the Marketing Hot Seat – a fortnightly series of honest conversations with senior marketers about what’s really shaping marketing today.
It’s a space for clear thinking, real experience, and the trade-offs behind modern marketing decisions, and we’re delighted to share them with you.
In this edition we speak to Georgie Burks, Head of Marketing at Allica Bank. Georgie is an experienced marketing leader who has built and scaled high-growth brands across fintech and technology, with previous roles at Penfold and Trainline.
With a career spanning brand strategy, commercial growth and integrated go-to-market, Georgie is passionate about building distinctive challenger brands and creating marketing that drives business growth. At Allica, she leads the full marketing function across brand, partnerships, communications, creative and distribution marketing.
What’s the one thing in marketing right now that isn’t getting the attention it deserves?
I think demand creation through PR and narrative building is really underplayed at the moment.
We spend a lot of time in the world of digital and performance, but not enough time thinking about the story we are putting into the market in the first place.
You need a confident and proactive comms strategy that gets people talking about the issues your business genuinely cares about. Without that, it becomes very hard to generate interest, particularly in categories like banking or utilities where differentiation is harder.
It’s also more than just a corporate narrative. It’s about the issues you want to advocate for on behalf of your customers. That’s where PR can be incredibly powerful if you get it right, but it’s often overlooked because teams are focused on short term acquisition.
What separates a good marketing partner from a great one?
For me, it comes down to the relationship. Can I be completely myself with them, in the same way I am with my internal team?
The best relationships feel peer to peer. You can have honest conversations, challenge each other, and deal with difficult moments because there is enough trust there to handle it.
Chemistry is just as important as capabilities. It really matters. You need to speak the same language, be able to read each other, and feel that level of comfort if you want the relationship to last. I also believe in building long term partnerships rather than constantly switching agencies. The strength of that relationship compounds over time.
One thing we do at Allica is work with smaller agencies, often within our own customer base. That means they really understand the world we operate in, and I’m often working directly with the MD. They become a true sounding board, which makes the work stronger.
And when I’m pitching for partners, I always look at how the teams treat each other. The culture and dynamics of their team matter. If that doesn’t align with how we operate, it’s a red flag.
What do you think is holding marketing back from delivering on its ambitions right now?
It comes back to clarity and how well we bring stakeholders on the journey.
It’s easy for marketers to come in with a big strategy full of jargon and expect people to get on board. In reality, that rarely works. You have to speak the language of the boardroom and put the effort into educating stakeholders on why certain things matter.
A lot of what we do in marketing needs that level of explanation. If you don’t invest in that, it’s very hard to get real buy in.
At Allica, for example, we anchored around brand awareness as a key objective, which can be a difficult sell. But the leadership team bought into it because we did the work upfront to explain why it mattered and what it would deliver.
It’s a balance between having conviction in what you know and making it easy for others to understand and support.
