At Four Pillars Gin, they have a mantra. They're makers, not marketers. Ironically, they have some of the best marketing in the world, but it's all about function. According to co founder and brand director Matt Jones, if being makers is such a big part of the Four Pillars appeal, customers need to get as close to that making process as they can, and that's what esthetics is all about. So how do you get an entire company obsessing over what things look like? My name is doctor amanthe Immer.
I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work. On today's My Favorite Tip episode, we go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite tip from the interview. In today's show, I speak with Matt Jones about what esthetics means to him and how he infuses it into everything about the Four Pillars brand.
It's a great question and it is going to reveal what a hypocrite having said that we're making marketers. I'm going to talk about a key piece of marketing, which is sort of design and imagery and esthetics and all those things. Look, the logic is pretty straightforward, and you're right, I do think it is. It is something that people consistently undervalue and underinvest in. And I'll tell you why in the second but I'll first of all, i'll tell you why I think it's important for Four Pillars. The
logic is pretty straightforward. If we are makers not marketers, or or to put it another way, if we are makers first and only then are we're marketers. Then the thought process was that the best way to get people to appreciate what we're making is to get them as close as we can to the process of making gin. It's sort of the opposite of you know the old cliche about if you ever saw a butcher maker sausage, you never read a sausage again. Well, we want people
to see the sausage being made. We want people to get up close and personal with the craft of making gin, because if they do, they'll realize just had differentiated, just have fantastic. The way that Cameron and the team at Four Pillars Distillery and Heels will make gin is but you can't force everyone, especially as you grow, as you grow beyond that hardcore early adopter audience, and you start
to reach a more mainstream consumer. You know, albeit it's a mainstream consumer who can afford to spend eighty ninety bucks on a bottle of gin, But nonetheless they're not that hardcore early adopter audience. You're growing into a more
of a mainstream audience. You can't force all of them to care as much as you do about the craft, about the attention to detail, but what you can do is lay down clues, is give them a sense of the craft, a sense of the attention to detail, a sense of how much you care about everything you do. And one of the ways that we can do that
is with the attention to detail. We apply to other areas to design, to print, to photography, imagery, aesthetics, film, always making sure that what's coming through is this sense of care, this sense of quality, this sense of craft. The second way it's really really important. I think that this sense of aesthetics is we are in a fundamentally sensory business. We're in an irrational business.
We're in a.
Business of people feeling good, not just about the flavor of the drink they make, the flavor of the gin they taste, but the process of making it the sense of they're taking care of themselves, they're treating themselves. There's a specialness to it. And so if we want to sort of evoke those feelings and those emotions and those associations, then we can't just let the liquid do the heavy lifting. We've got to help it. We've got to help it with the qual the packaging, the quality of the imagery,
the photography. Again, so for all those reasons, both the way that we are conveying our craft values, the way that we're communicating something really important and inherent four pillars, which is that attend to detail, but also the way that we're trying to evoke those same emotions, those same sensory cues that we want the liquid and the drink to For all those reasons, it's really really important to us.
And how do you do that though? In terms of having this really high standard with aesthetics? I mean, you know, it's one thing to have brand guidelines that are followed by everyone that works on visual aspects of the brand, but like, how do you like uphold this really high standard to have everything be you know, so aesthetically like pleasing and beautiful.
Well, first of all, it's nice to hear you say that. Secondly, I guess there's different ways into that answer. You know, one is how do you do it mechanically? Or you've got to work with good people. And that's not just about having people in the business with a great eye, great understanding of how the brand should show up in the world, great attention to detail. But not everyone has that in their business, and that's okay. You've got to
have great partners. We work with phenomenal photographers, stylists. We've got an incredible design and content agency, people I've been working with for more than a decade now, who we trust with our brand's life. But a different way to answer that question is you've got to value it. You've got to allocate both budget and time and attention to that. You've got to not allow good enough to be good enough.
And I think this goes to it's kind of bigger conversation about understanding what are the things that are going to move the needle for your business and move the needle for your brand, and making sure that having identified those things, you invest appropriately in them and you don't underinvest in them. Because we are all enormously constrained aren't we in terms of not just the budgets we've got, but the time we have, the emotional energy we have.
And it's very easy to allow something to get to a point of good enough, that sense of that will do, and to go, oh, thank goodness, that's another thing ticked off the list, and in some areas that will be good enough for your business. But if these are things that are going to help to define your business, to differentiate your brand, then good enough is not going to
cut it. And so for us, the decision early on was if Cameron, who's one of my co founders, was going to make the best gin in the world, and stew the third co founder, was going to go and tell the best stories in the world and go and knock down doors and do all the amazing stuff he
does building relationships. One of the contributions I could make from a brand point of view was to make sure that every touch point of that liquid and that story was as good as it could be and working as hard as it could And that is an exhausting effort.
That is a decision that you make to not let things slide past you that clearly could be better, and to surround yourself with people who when you sort of run out of a little bit of energy and go, oh, I don't know, I think maybe that design's good enough, they go, I don't think it is. I think we need to push again.
If you enjoyed this excerpt from my chat with Matt, you might want to go back and listen to the full episode, which you can find a link to in the show notes. If you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered that helped me work better, ranging from software and gadgets that I'm loving through the interesting research findings. You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot co. That's how
I Work dot co. Thank you for sharing part of your day with me by listening to How I Work. If you're keen for more tips on how to work better, connect with me via LinkedIn or Instagram. I'm very easy to find. Just search for Amantha Imba. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part of the Koln Nation. I am so grateful for being able to work and live on this beautiful land, and I want to pay my respects to elders past,
present and emerging. How I work is produced by inventing with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba who did the audio mix and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise