Björn Otto

Björn Otto did not set out to become a marketer. He trained as an environmental-technology engineer in Germany, and then spent more than a decade on the commercial side of water, first selling activated carbon at Chemviron (one of the largest producers of the stuff), then membranes at newterra and MFT, and finally running a business unit and the marketing at H+E, also known as Hager + Elsässer, one of the big plant manufacturers. So he is that rare thing in this field, someone who can read a datasheet and write a campaign, and he kept hitting the same wall: he could never find a marketing partner who understood both the water industry and the technology at the same time. In February 2022 he stopped looking and built one, which is how Interius Solutions started.

Björn Otto's whole argument starts from a problem he watched up close, which is that the water industry is so deeply engineering-driven that it quietly treats marketing as an afterthought. In his words, when a company hands its marketing team nothing but the next slide deck to prettify, you should not be surprised when they end up using about 8% of what marketing can actually do. The other 92%, the strategy, the positioning, the genuine understanding of who the customer is and what they are trying to buy, gets kept upstairs with the chief executive and never reaches the people who could act on it. That gap, between marketing as decoration and marketing as strategy, is the entire reason Interius exists.

Björn Otto's fix is less about clever campaigns than about a change of habit, and his most-quoted line sums it up: facts tell, stories sell. Water companies, he says, love to talk in features, my membrane is 0.04 microns, my plant has this throughput, and the trouble with a feature is that it makes you replaceable the moment a competitor shows up with 0.03. The customer does not actually care about the pore size, he wants to know what comes out of the tap. So Björn pushes founders toward benefits over features, toward a defensible niche instead of a head-on fight with the big incumbents, and toward building what he calls a professional zebra, a recognizable expert face the market cannot ignore. You can find the full playbook across our water-tech coverage and in his two long conversations on the show.

Björn Otto is also unusually clear about why any of this matters, and it is not the marketing. When I asked him on the show what trend he wished the industry would chase, he turned it into something personal: he has three boys, and the middle one, who wants to be an inventor, once heard that children in Africa die for lack of clean water and answered, in the way a ten-year-old does, just build a pipe from the ocean, then wandered off to his PlayStation. That stuck with Björn, because the uncomfortable truth is that we already have the technologies, the awareness and the capabilities, and the crisis is still here anyway. It is why Interius pledges to give at least 10% of its yearly profit to water-related charities, and it is the through-line under all the talk about positioning: better marketing is, in his telling, just how good water technology actually reaches the people who need it.

“Take your engineers and train them in marketing. And keep them with their water knowledge, with their engineering hat.”

That is Björn Otto's bet in one sentence: the water industry already has the people it needs for great marketing, it has just never thought to train them.