FASCINATING FINDS FROM A FASCINATING MIND: MATT JONES, FOUR PILLARS GIN & CREATIVE STRATEGIST
We sat down with Four Pillars Gin Co-Founder and Creative Strategist Matt Jones to talk brand, attention, AI and experience. Here are four ideas from the conversation that got us thinking.
When you get the chance to sit around a table with one of the people behind Four Pillars Gin and talk about brand, marketing and experience, you come armed with questions.
We recently invited Matt Jones, Co-Founder of Four Pillars Gin and author of Lessons from Gin, to join a group of marketing leaders at Bopp & Tone in Sydney for our latest CAPITAL-e Marketing Roundtable.
Over lunch, the conversation moved from the story behind Four Pillars to attention, AI, creators, live experiences and what it takes to build a brand people genuinely want to spend time with.
There was plenty to take away from it. These are four ideas that really got us thinking.
1. THE ROOM BELONGS TO THE AUDIENCE
As marketers, we love to orchestrate great experiences for our audiences. But there are always competing priorities. We need to fill an agenda. An executive needs a speaking slot. There's new messaging to land. Sales have customers they'd like in the room.
Matt's point was simple: the room belongs to the audience.
It was a particularly interesting one for us at CAPITAL-e because creating experiences is at the heart of what we do.
If we're asking someone to give us their time and attention, the value exchange needs to be worthwhile. The content and experience should be intentional, valuable and ultimately help build connection and trust.
It sounds obvious when you say it. In practice, it's surprisingly easy to lose sight of.
2. THERE'S NO SHORTAGE OF CONTENT. THERE IS A SHORTAGE OF ATTENTION.
One of the broader themes around the table was just how much we're all competing for attention.
There is already more content being created than any of us could possibly consume, even more so with AI. The temptation for brands is to respond by producing more too. More posts, more emails, more videos and more content competing for the same finite amount of attention.
So perhaps the more useful question isn't simply what else can we create? But is what we're creating genuinely worth someone's time?
This is also where live experiences become interesting.
In a recent interview with CEO Magazine, our CEO Andrew Everingham described a “vanillarisation” happening as people increasingly “outsource their thinking and go with whatever the large language model serves up to them.”
As more of what we consume starts to look and sound the same, genuinely human experiences have an opportunity to stand out.
3. ARE YOU MAKING SANDWICHES OR PEACOCKS?
This was one of our favourite ideas from the conversation.
Matt talked about the difference between “sandwiches” and “peacocks”.
Sandwiches are improvements that make something easier, faster or more convenient. They're useful and customers appreciate them, but they're also relatively easy for someone else to copy.
Peacocks are the things that create distinctive differences. They're acts of design, storytelling, creativity and emotion that make someone notice you, remember you and, ideally, talk about you.
Every business needs sandwiches. We all want things to work well. But brands need a few peacocks too.
Four Pillars is a great example. Its success wasn't just about making and marketing gin. There was an obsession with the quality of the product, but also with bringing customers closer to the craft through the distillery, the design, storytelling and experiences around the brand, creating a distinctive differentiator in their marketing that allowed them to be a peacock in a saturated market.
4. EVERY BUSINESS HAS THREE STORIES
Matt also talked about three stories that exist in every business.
There's the internal story: how you see the world and what you believe.
There's the growth story: how the business is going to win.
And then there's the story other people tell about you when you're not in the room.
That last one really stayed with us.
As marketers, we can shape a brand, create campaigns, buy media and tell people what we'd like to be known for. But ultimately, we don't get to write that third story ourselves.
What we can do is give people good reasons to tell it.
That's something the Four Pillars story demonstrates particularly well. There wasn't one clever campaign responsible for building the brand. It was years of being intentional about the product, the experience around it, the relationships with customers and the way all those pieces worked together.
And perhaps that's what connected so much of our conversation with Matt.
Whether we're thinking about content, events, AI or brand, being intentional about the experience we're creating for people matters.
Are we respecting their time? Are we creating something valuable? Are we giving them a reason to pay attention, connect with us and, ideally, tell someone else about it?
Plenty for us to keep thinking about.
A big thank you to Matt for such an interesting conversation, and to everyone who joined us around the table.
If you'd like to join us at a future CAPITAL-e Marketing Roundtable, or have something coming up where we might be able to add value, we'd love to hear from you.
And if you’d like to get in touch with Matt and what he can offer, you can reach out through https://www.matt-jones.com.au/
