March 10, 2026 – AI Marketing Vanitha Swaminathan and Four Pillars Gin Matt Jones

[00:00:00] Intro 1: The AM?FM Radio Network broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration Award-Winning School for Startups Radio.

[00:00:12] Jim Beach: We don’t have time to run the full introduction. Today we got a cram pack. So first up we have Professor Vanta swab. Talking about digital AI marketing.

[00:00:21] Jim Beach: We have an amazing conversation about AI and customer. It’s just great. And then Matt Jones, three time winner of the best gen in the world, and he started the business just recently as kind of a lark, an amazing show. We’re gonna go ahead and get started right now. Thanks for being with us. You know, as AI takes over everything, we need to reassess all of our basic skill sets, including marketing and branding, and I’m excited to do that now, please welcome to the show, uh, professor Vanni Swami Natan.

[00:00:53] Jim Beach: She has just written a, her second book called Hyper Digital Marketing, six Pillars of [00:01:00] Strategic Brand Marketing in an AI Powered World. She was also one of the authors of like the. The epitome, the branding management textbook that all of the colleges use. So very impressive. She has won tons of awards, including best paper awards from the journals and things like that.

[00:01:18] Jim Beach: She’s also been very active in the American Marketing Association. Been on several boards there, very prestigious. Professor, welcome to the show. How you doing?

[00:01:29] Vanitha Swaminathan: Good. Jim, thank you so much for having me on your show.

[00:01:32] Jim Beach: It is my pleasure. So a hyper digital marketing. Let’s start with just hyper digital. What’s hyper digital?

[00:01:40] Vanitha Swaminathan: Great question. Uh, the term hyper digital, I drew Drew inspiration from a book I read by Lovelock, which talked about hyper digitalization and the rise of intelligent beings, uh, which will process information 10,000 times faster than us humans will. And from that, i, I drew inspiration to [00:02:00] talk about hyper digital marketing, which talks about marketing in the age of ai.

[00:02:04] Jim Beach: Okay. What’s the difference? How has it changed between five years ago and today?

[00:02:09] Vanitha Swaminathan: I think it’s a huge pivot. Uh, if you remember the time when we had to pivot from traditional marketing to digital, this is a pivot that’s just as significant. Uh, all of the objects that surround us products, services are likely to become much smarter, more intelligent, thanks to artificial intelligence, and that will mean that marketers have to step up their game quite significantly.

[00:02:33] Jim Beach: Okay. Does it change any of the rules of marketing, the PS and all of that, price

[00:02:39] Vanitha Swaminathan: placement? All of it. So I, I introduced the six pillars, which are, uh, a dramatically different set of pillars or strategies that digital marketers have to follow. And what I argue is that these strategic pillars are a way of thinking about AI in a strategic way rather than a tactical way.

[00:02:57] Vanitha Swaminathan: And, and they require a [00:03:00] fundamental transformation of the organization in order to implement it.

[00:03:03] Jim Beach: Okay. Before we get into the pillars, I wanna ask a couple more questions. Sure. Is there a AI tool that is better than the others for marketing with branding or marketing?

[00:03:16] Vanitha Swaminathan: Actually, uh, it’s a whole industry now.

[00:03:19] Vanitha Swaminathan: Uh, there’s, there’s literally dozens and dozens of AI tools, which can help with content creation, content management, ad placement, programmatic advertising, all the way to product development and, and so on and so forth. So the list is endless. So there isn’t a single tool. It’s really a host of tools or an entire toolkit that you could use.

[00:03:43] Vanitha Swaminathan: For reworking or rethinking your marketing, give us some of the names, please. Well, you have your standard productivity hacks, which, which use, you know, open AI chat, GPT, uh, cloud ai, Google Gemini. Those [00:04:00] are of course, important, but then there are tools that are. Sitting on top of those tools. So you think about something like, Hey, Jen, for example, or Synthesia.

[00:04:09] Vanitha Swaminathan: These are tools that can help create videos, create content that are highly personalized to different audiences. So that’s another sort of set of tools. And then there’s of course the data analytics tools. How do you use your customer data to generate insights that can then be leveraged to help personalize your customer offerings?

[00:04:30] Vanitha Swaminathan: And that requires another set of tools. So really there’s, there’s a lot. And then there’s. Uh, Salesforce tools like Agent Force from Salesforce that helps your Salesforce do lead generation and, uh, uh, close the sales deals. So there’s, like I said, I could go on and on. There’s many, many tools that are available to marketers today.

[00:04:53] Jim Beach: Alright, good information. I, this radio show is not a fan of anything Salesforce related. [00:05:00] I just, I’m not a fan of Salesforce in so many ways. It’s horrible that you buy a product and then have to bring in a consulting firm for a hundred thousand dollars to show you how to use that product. I just. Not a fan anyway.

[00:05:15] Vanitha Swaminathan: Yeah. I, I, I do think a lot of these tools, I mean, we have to think about how they can be used in collaboration with humans, right? I mean, it’s not as if we are, uh, replacing you think of these as, as tools that can help the current market or do their job better. And that’s how I think CEOs should really approach AI implementation.

[00:05:36] Vanitha Swaminathan: I know there’s a lot of news about how. AI is going to take jobs, but really I think the idea is to bring your current sale current employees along, uh, re and train them on how to utilize AI to do their jobs better, if that makes sense to you. It does, it

[00:05:52] Jim Beach: does. I’m writing several books right now and I have become addicted to AI [00:06:00] and using open ai, the chat GPT, product 5.2, and I will feed it a chapter.

[00:06:08] Jim Beach: Ask it for the best title, uh, chapter title, and it always produces four or five. And it says, this is the one we like the best and here’s why. And I can never disagree with it. I always think that their answer is probably pretty good. It also renamed my book, and this is funny. It did it without asking, it just started referring to the new name that it liked.

[00:06:32] Jim Beach: And

[00:06:32] Vanitha Swaminathan: that’s amazing. Yeah. Name

[00:06:34] Jim Beach: is infinitely better than my name. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

[00:06:37] Vanitha Swaminathan: Well, I look forward to seeing your book. Uh, Jim, I, I think that’s one of the very good use cases of AI today is as a productivity hack. You know, it’s something that can make you do your job much faster and also overcomes the Cold start problem for many people.

[00:06:53] Vanitha Swaminathan: So it allows you to get started on a task, uh, which you may be procrastinating on, or. You know, not [00:07:00] wanting to do. And so I think those are all very good uses of AI for daily productivity that, uh, we think would be very helpful to organizations.

[00:07:08] Jim Beach: I’ve gotten so addicted to it that my kids are teasing me. I, you know, it’ll give you a score.

[00:07:14] Jim Beach: If you put the chapter in, it’ll give you a grade, and the top is 10. And I’m sitting here now, it’s gamified. If I can get a score, I’m gonna play the game. You know, it’s all, redo the chapter with their recommendations and it’ll go to a nine one. And I’ll be like, damnit, I want that. Point nine. What do I do to get the 0.9?

[00:07:33] Jim Beach: And I think it’s helping my writing and making my writing so much better.

[00:07:37] Vanitha Swaminathan: That’s great. That’s great to hear.

[00:07:40] Jim Beach: Alright. Uh, let’s talk about the, the brands. How does this change a new company name or the name of a new product? Would, does it change the process for you of how you end up with brand names or? A brand is supposed to mean mentally.

[00:07:59] Vanitha Swaminathan: Yeah, I [00:08:00] think that’s a a good question. So when we think about marketing, we think about it at two levels. Like I said, it’s the very tactical level. So when you think about generating a brand name or a design, or a logo or a tagline, these are all things that you can use AI to help you do, and that’s a very good tactical use of AI for creativity tasks.

[00:08:21] Vanitha Swaminathan: There’s also a broader, more strategic use of ai, and that’s what my book gets into. So the six pillars are not really just um, uh, uh, tactical applications. They’re really fundamental changes in how an organization approaches things. So. Take the example of platform, one of the chapters or pillars is really how you can, how you can re-envision your brand as a platform and how can AI tools really assist you in platform izing your brand and, and trying to create a platform where you have.

[00:08:53] Vanitha Swaminathan: End users using your brand, but also have a, a counterpart like developers [00:09:00] creating valuable goods based on your platform to help address different, different kinds of, uh, problems that customers are faced with. So this idea that AI can really facilitate that is, is a big deal. Uh, there’s also. Another platform we can consider, which is personalization.

[00:09:18] Vanitha Swaminathan: How can AI really create this N of one customer, right? How do you actually individually target customers with specific offerings that are tailored to their very specific context? That’s another way in which AI can be hugely beneficial to marketing.

[00:09:35] Jim Beach: Right. Before you go on, can you. Tell me how the personalization works.

[00:09:41] Jim Beach: So,

[00:09:41] Vanitha Swaminathan: yeah, uh, that’s a good question. If you wanna target

[00:09:43] Jim Beach: me or somebody.

[00:09:45] Vanitha Swaminathan: Yeah. How does

[00:09:45] Jim Beach: that happen?

[00:09:47] Vanitha Swaminathan: Yeah. So I think when, when we think about the old personalization, it used to be based on segmentation. So you think about demographic segment. So for example, uh, Jim Beach is, uh, you know, uh, is, uh, is a [00:10:00] male, looks in Atlanta, et et cetera, et cetera.

[00:10:03] Vanitha Swaminathan: But now we have the ability to do contextual targeting, right? So let’s say you just went to search for, um, a present to give to your, uh, significant other. Uh, for her birthday. Then we use that information about what you’ve recently looked for to enable personalized content. So looking for a gift for your significant other.

[00:10:27] Vanitha Swaminathan: Here are some options for you to consider and so on. Now, the, the downside is really excessive personalization can get very creepy, so you really don’t want the marketer to have that much personal information about you. And there is this notion of, of. Too much personalization, but with within reason. I think contextual targeting can produce incredible results for marketers that the previous version of demographic or even psychographic segmentation could not.

[00:10:56] Jim Beach: Alright, so is that achieved by scraping my [00:11:00] social media profiles and my LinkedIn profile and

[00:11:02] Vanitha Swaminathan: yes. Things like that. Okay. And, and also in the way in which you ask questions, right? And the way in which you ask questions from your, uh, AI platform or even the way in which you engage with search on, uh, on browsers, all of that information can be brought to bear on, uh, on how the contextual targeting works and how personalization happens today.

[00:11:24] Jim Beach: So what about this sales pitch? Uh, professor I downloaded all of the social media and everything else that you have put about your company. And by the way, there’s 12 factory workers that are posting about your company right now. And Fred down on the floor said that there’s always a 30 minute lull between the transfer of a and b.

[00:11:48] Jim Beach: Could I go in and say. Even your own company, Fred, down on the floor is quoting, there’s a 30 minute problem between A and B, and I’m here to solve that problem.

[00:11:57] Vanitha Swaminathan: Exactly. That’s a wonderful way in which you can think [00:12:00] about contextual targeting in a B2B space. Yes, and I think, is that

[00:12:03] Jim Beach: creepy that I’m quoting your employees to you?

[00:12:05] Vanitha Swaminathan: I don’t think so. I think one of the things we found in research on personalization is to the extent that you’re able to share how you got the information. Especially if it’s publicly available, customers are willing to, willing to be targeted in that way. Um, but if it’s information that’s obtained from very personal sources that the customer does not want you to know, then there is this reactance, if you will, of.

[00:12:30] Vanitha Swaminathan: You know, why are you targeting me with that information? Right? So marketers have to be willing to be upfront about how they got the information, just like you just did. You know, you said you looked in social media and this information was publicly available, and I’m using that information to now provide you with a solution to a problem that you didn’t even know that you, you had if you weren’t looking through some of these posts.

[00:12:52] Vanitha Swaminathan: And so that’s kind of how we think about personalization. Um, a moderate amount of personalization.

[00:12:58] Jim Beach: Okay. That’s a key [00:13:00] thing you, you said, explain how you got it right.

[00:13:03] Vanitha Swaminathan: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:13:04] Jim Beach: I think that’s the key takeaway there. What about purpose? Another one of the pillars, purpose.

[00:13:10] Vanitha Swaminathan: Oh, that is actually incredibly important.

[00:13:13] Vanitha Swaminathan: I was, uh, I’ve been talking to a number of CEOs and CMOs in connection with the book, and one of the things that really stands out to me is, uh, applications of AI at the strategic level have to be preceded with an understanding of corporate purpose. And the reason that’s important is that. AI is one of those tools that can allow your company to pretty much go anywhere you want.

[00:13:37] Vanitha Swaminathan: I mean, any product, any service that you wanna offer is within reach. But what are really some guardrails you wanna draw around that? How do you define what your company is about? That task requires you to start with purpose, and so AI will optimize for anything that you want to optimize for. If you wanna optimize for efficiency, you’re gonna get efficiency in your organization.[00:14:00]

[00:14:00] Vanitha Swaminathan: But if you wanna optimize for corporate purpose, so let’s say your corporate purpose is customer. Uh, you know, uh, engagement or ensuring customer satisfaction, then that’s the one that’s going to be optimized across all of the actions of your firm. And so purpose is kind of this unifying thing within the organization, and I, I, I talk about it in the book, it starts with that, right purpose has to be the starting point for you to strategically think about AI because then every decision that you make within the organization, every investment is gonna be.

[00:14:31] Vanitha Swaminathan: Seem through that lens. And so that’s really a critical starting point for all CEOs and CMOs and CTOs.

[00:14:38] Jim Beach: Alright, this is one of my big touch points or argument points. I’ve ar uh, argued with Simon Sinek about purpose. Many times I just totally disagree with him. I as an entrepreneur, right? The people who listen to this show we’re our, our purpose is to keep the lights on for another year.

[00:14:59] Jim Beach: Well, you can [00:15:00] like, no, that’s not acceptable. I, but that’s what it is. You know, we can’t think about making the world a better place in saving the whales yet, you know? Yeah. Maybe in the year 10, that can become our purpose, but right now, be honest, the entrepreneur’s purpose is to keep the lights on another year.

[00:15:16] Jim Beach: What do you think about that?

[00:15:16] Vanitha Swaminathan: I think that’s a fair point, but I think across different, if you wanna think about purpose as informing your KPIs. All right, let’s bring it down to brass tacks. Um. You, you have organizations that want to save the whales, but you also have very simple purpose. You wanna make your customer lives better.

[00:15:32] Vanitha Swaminathan: Right. I think that’s a shared purpose that all entrepreneurs will agree that, that that has to be the central point of the organization is, is. Satisfying the customer. But then what does that mean really in terms of KPIs, right? I was just at a reducing wait times. It could be improving patient satisfaction, it could be ensuring, um, you know, diseases are, are cured within the shortest amount of time.

[00:15:58] Vanitha Swaminathan: So how you [00:16:00] define your corporate purpose across those three scenarios will really drive how you implement ai, if that makes sense to you. And so that’s what I mean when I talk about purpose. It could be a grand social purpose, but it could also be a very specific purpose that’s related to your product or service.

[00:16:19] Jim Beach: I can’t believe I that you go to or you’re in Pittsburgh and all of my thoughts now are about that TV show, the Pit. Have you seen that TV show? Yes.

[00:16:27] Vanitha Swaminathan: Yes.

[00:16:28] Jim Beach: Did, did you see the episode where they’re arguing about using AI in Yes, I’ve

[00:16:33] Vanitha Swaminathan: heard about it. I haven’t seen it yet, but

[00:16:35] Jim Beach: I’ve heard about it. Oh, it’s, it’s amazing.

[00:16:36] Jim Beach: It’s, oh, first of all, I think that’s the best show on television right now. I just love it. I agree. I agree. It’s great television. But the episode where AI becomes the center argument point is just fascinating. And to see the nurses and doctors pushing back against it and then to see it make an error, and then the person gets in tr the person who didn’t want to use AI gets in trouble [00:17:00] because her use of the AI was.

[00:17:02] Jim Beach: She didn’t proofread, in other words.

[00:17:03] Vanitha Swaminathan: That is a great point. And uh, Jim, I talk about this idea of a, of trust. You know, customer trust is an important outcome. So organizations that rush into AI without thinking about their purpose could in fact pay a trust penalty. So the more and more. You rely on AI without human input, you might actually end up making mistakes like the one that you just mentioned that was featured on the pit.

[00:17:29] Vanitha Swaminathan: And those mistakes can cost, uh, a penalty in terms of customer trust and to earn that trust back is going to be extremely difficult. So I argue in the book that the six pillars are really a governance. Strategy. It’s a way for organizations to self-govern in such a way that, that they maintain customer trust, that they ensure that the utilization of AI is, is strategic, is aligned with what the rest of the organization is doing, and moves you closer to [00:18:00] whatever it is you’ve defined in terms of your goal or purpose.

[00:18:04] Jim Beach: Ooh, the fourth pillar, I can’t even understand what the word is. Fial

[00:18:09] Vanitha Swaminathan: experiences.

[00:18:10] Jim Beach: Yes. Is that combining physical and digital?

[00:18:13] Vanitha Swaminathan: That’s right. I, uh, I, I use Fial as a way of, uh, of describing the world that we live in today in terms of how customers engage with organizations. So it’s a combination of digital touchpoints and physical touchpoints, and the seamlessness with which you transfer between physical and digital.

[00:18:33] Vanitha Swaminathan: It’s really critical to the customer experience. And so if you have a broken system, your interactions with a company on its e-commerce website will not be well aligned with, let’s say, a, a physical touchpoint when you walk into a real store. But with ai it’s, it, it helps you put together data across multiple in such a way that let’s say you’re searching for, uh, a particular appliance on your website and you walk into the [00:19:00] store to check it out.

[00:19:01] Vanitha Swaminathan: The salesperson at the store knows what kind of brands you’ve been looking at, what kind of models you’re interested in, and is then able to continue the conversation from where you left off on the website. And that’s the power of a seamless digital experience, and that’s really important.

[00:19:18] Jim Beach: Alright.

[00:19:19] Jim Beach: Remember the old rule of seven, right? Uh, it takes seven touches to sell something, right?

[00:19:26] Vanitha Swaminathan: Yep. The magic number seven.

[00:19:27] Jim Beach: Yes. Has that changed now because of ai?

[00:19:32] Vanitha Swaminathan: I haven’t really got, uh, I don’t have a good answer. I, I think the space is still evolving, but I can tell you one thing that what, what we are able to do today in terms of integrating across many, many touchpoints and creating a consistent and unified brand.

[00:19:50] Vanitha Swaminathan: That’s really the, the value of this technology and of, of hyper digitalization is the ability to create consistent touch points. Uh, [00:20:00] previously there was just a. You know, plethora of touchpoint and, and your experience with each touchpoint, your experience of the brand could be quite different. And that creates inconsistencies.

[00:20:11] Vanitha Swaminathan: It also creates this problem where one touch point is misaligned with another touchpoint, and, and the customer is, is confused and the brand doesn’t know how to control all of that, right? So that’s why this idea of thinking about a brand as a platform unifying and, and ensuring. You know, uh, ease of experience at every touch point is really a critical idea.

[00:20:34] Jim Beach: So plethora used to be our number one favorite word on the show. And whenever we have the word plethora, we always have a celebration, but we’ve replaced it now with Parado. You know what Parado is?

[00:20:49] Vanitha Swaminathan: No,

[00:20:49] Jim Beach: it’s when you see human faces in a pile of rocks or a cloud, or there’s a picture of Mars and it looks like a human face, and [00:21:00] therefore that proves that humans were on Mars at one point.

[00:21:04] Jim Beach: It’s, uh, projecting human faces into things like a cloud, you know? Oh, there’s Benjamin Franklin right there in that cloud. Don’t you see it?

[00:21:12] Vanitha Swaminathan: I get it. Yeah, I get it. Anyway.

[00:21:13] Jim Beach: You get

[00:21:14] Vanitha Swaminathan: half

[00:21:14] Jim Beach: a point because you said plethora, just letting you know,

[00:21:18] Vanitha Swaminathan: I get to say, uh, anthropomorphisation. Is that a word? Oh, that’s

[00:21:22] Jim Beach: a great one too.

[00:21:24] Vanitha Swaminathan: And so the idea of anthropomorphizing or creating human images and, and objects is another, another phrase that I like to use in that context.

[00:21:34] Jim Beach: My ultimate favorite has to be, uh, neuroplasticity. The fact that my brain is changeable. I love it.

[00:21:41] Vanitha Swaminathan: Yeah. Isn’t that cool? I love that.

[00:21:43] Jim Beach: That’s another one of our favorite words.

[00:21:47] Jim Beach: Alright, we only have about a minute or so left. I don’t wanna give everyone all of the pillars ’cause they still have to buy the book, but let’s cover one or one of the, the last two that we haven’t talked about. Let’s talk about partnerships, if you would [00:22:00] please. How do my marketing partnerships help? Or change because of ai.

[00:22:06] Vanitha Swaminathan: Yeah, so I, I do think that, again, it goes back to this idea of brand is platform, and this is where all of the pillars are sort of interconnected. Uh, you may have different partners helping you with different aspects of, of delivering on your brand. So you know, you might have, for example, if you’re a content creator, you might have a distributor who’s your partner?

[00:22:27] Vanitha Swaminathan: How do you make sure that all of the partners align on. On again, the brand experience, the brand purpose, the brand promise, uh, that is again, where AI can help. It can keep track. So if you, let’s say, identify, uh, specific areas where partners have to be aligned and you keep monitoring the experience across these different partnerships, then you can actually allow AI to give you, let’s say, uh, an alert when, um, when let’s say your partner is behaving in a way that.

[00:22:59] Vanitha Swaminathan: [00:23:00] It’s not consistent with what your brand is, right? And then you can immediately pivot attention and try to address that. So that’s one use of of AI for partnerships. It can also help you identify partners. So we talked earlier about, uh, AI as a tool for sales. You can also use it as a tool for helping identify partners that might be in, in adjacent spaces that could help you improve your overall, uh, product or service.

[00:23:26] Vanitha Swaminathan: Do you have a digital webinar coming up about this? I, uh, I have multiple webinars coming up, but the dates are a little bit in flux. Um, uh, please look for my updates on my website.

[00:23:40] Jim Beach: Well, I think you have one of the best website URLs. You’ve got a great one. Share the, uh, with the audience, uh, the URL please.

[00:23:49] Vanitha Swaminathan: Um, so I have, uh, prof vanni.com is one of my, uh, websites. Uh, I also am available on LinkedIn. You can also find me at the University of Pittsburgh School of [00:24:00] Business.

[00:24:01] Jim Beach: I like the Prof Vanni one the most. I think that’s a great URL you.

[00:24:05] Vanitha Swaminathan: Thank you.

[00:24:07] Jim Beach: Um, do you post class information on there too, or is it just about the new book right now?

[00:24:12] Vanitha Swaminathan: Uh, it’s only about the new book, um, and you can certainly find ways in which you can connect with me, uh, uh, on LinkedIn or on my website, and I can give you information about upcoming executive education programs with several that I’m, uh, planning.

[00:24:29] Jim Beach: Fantastic. How would you interview a marketer today? Say you’re the CEO and you have to hire a marketing vice president.

[00:24:39] Jim Beach: What would your questions be?

[00:24:42] Vanitha Swaminathan: I think that’s a very good question. I think openness to, to being able to integrate some of these new tools. I would gauge, gauge any applicant for that. Uh, how much AI literacy do they have? Have they been. Playing with chat GPT, just like you mentioned you have, uh, Jim, I think that’s really a [00:25:00] critical skill and it’s, it’s easy to do.

[00:25:02] Vanitha Swaminathan: Um, I always advise my students spend 30 minutes a day learning how to work with ai, and that really is the critical skill. Um, it’s not eliminating humans by any means. Human AI collaboration is really important, but we’re in an era where we’re trying to figure out how to best integrate AI and keep.

[00:25:22] Vanitha Swaminathan: Humans in the loop, if you will. What is the right mix? And someone who has an openness to doing that, who has the ability to learn new skills and is familiar with technology, would be a critical way to evaluate a marketer today.

[00:25:39] Jim Beach: And who is doing this the best? Do you? Can you think of a company that’s doing this really, really well and are really, really horribly?

[00:25:48] Vanitha Swaminathan: I like to say Nike is one of my go-to brands in this space. They’ve done a great job of integrating, uh, technology. So if you think about the Nike app, for [00:26:00] example, which keeps track of how many steps you’re running and integrates that with your, um, with your exercise goals. So that’s an example of Platformization.

[00:26:09] Vanitha Swaminathan: So Nike was a shoe brand, but they found a way in which to ize. Their brand. Uh, they also have done, um, a great job of balancing emotional appeals and informational appeals with their customers. So as a brand, I really think that they’re doing a great job. Um, so balancing, balancing, if you will, innovation and consumer trust is, is one of those things that I look for in a great brand today.

[00:26:37] Jim Beach: Alright, great information. Dr. Veni, the SW on. How do we Get in Touch? Follow online. Give us the URL one more time please.

[00:26:45] Vanitha Swaminathan: Uh, you can find me on prof vanita.com and you can also find me on LinkedIn if, if you, uh, look for me at the University of Pittsburgh School of Business, you can find me in the faculty list as well.

[00:26:59] Vanitha Swaminathan: Uh, I look [00:27:00] forward to engaging with your audience, Jim.

[00:27:02] Jim Beach: Well, thank you so much for being with us. Great, great information and we’d love to have you back. Thank you so much.

[00:27:06] Vanitha Swaminathan: Yeah, take it easy. Thank you, Jim.

And we will be right back.

[00:27:18] Jim Beach: And we are back still very appreciative that you are with us. Maybe you’re tired or been having a hard day and you need a. Little bit of gin to help you. Our next guest has that for you. Please welcome Matt Jones. He started off as a political strategist and he says that he failed there. That turned into a brand strategist, and he says he was very successful at that and he became an accidental startup entrepreneur.

[00:27:45] Jim Beach: He’s bounced around from London to New York City and has had government economists, speech writer, political strategist, jobs. Uh, came to America and worked for a global strategy company and that worked [00:28:00] out well. And he then moved to Australia where he has finished living, I guess, has made that permanent.

[00:28:07] Jim Beach: He ran his brand business there and that was very successful called Think Story Experience. And he’s a big fan of the story. And somewhere along the way he got tricked into starting a gin business called Four Pillars Gin. It is a about a decade old now, and it was named the world’s leading gin at the International Wine and Spirits Competition.

[00:28:31] Jim Beach: Three times in a row, he has written a book about the gin business called Lessons from Gin. Matt Jones, welcome to the show. How you doing,

[00:28:42] Matt Jones: Jim? I’m well. It is nice to be here. I think it’s, uh, it’s a testament to how badly my political career went that I had to turn to gin, but it’s been, um, it’s been fun and it’s good to be, uh, good to be chatting with you today.

[00:28:54] Jim Beach: Likewise, maybe it was the politicians that you were working with. Who were you

[00:28:57] Matt Jones: working with? [00:29:00] Look, so I, I worked exclusively in opposition, which is a, a, a clever way of saying I lost every election that I fought. But I, uh, I worked with a number of conservative politicians in the uk and my, my role was in, in the world of speech writing and as you say, storytelling and strategy.

[00:29:17] Matt Jones: And, uh, while I wasn’t successful there. Politics teaches you a really important lesson, which is even when it comes to arguably the most important decisions we make as people who do, we wanna represent us, run our schools, run our hospitals, run our military, human beings are not very rational. And ultimately, that’s the lesson I guess I took out of my political failure and then took into the world of brand understanding how emotions are really what govern our decisions.

[00:29:44] Jim Beach: Oh, that is so very, very true. Do you enjoy any of the American political tv, the West Wing or the House of Cards, which has all also got a UK version, I guess. Do you enjoy that?

[00:29:58] Matt Jones: I do, and you know what? I feel I’ve [00:30:00] bounced around from one TV show to another. When I worked in politics, everyone wanted to imagine they were in the West Wing.

[00:30:06] Matt Jones: And the question was, were they, were they Josh? Were they Sam? Where did they, where did they fit? And then obviously I moved into the world of Mad Men and uh, I moved to New York City, into the agency world. But yeah, I’m a, I’m a big. Binge of Quality tv and actually I’m following with interest right now, the, the dramas around Paramount and HBO and everything that’s going on over there.

[00:30:25] Matt Jones: So yeah. Fascinating.

[00:30:26] Jim Beach: Your character on West Wing would be Toby, a bald guy.

[00:30:33] Matt Jones: Sadly. Sadly. His career, yeah.

[00:30:35] Jim Beach: Had he lost every single campaign until he finally got Bartlett elected and he was in his fifties when he did that. So I think you’re Toby.

[00:30:44] Matt Jones: On so many levels, I’ll, I’ll grudgingly take Toby. Exactly right.

[00:30:50] Matt Jones: Thank you. I know we’re doing radio, but you are correct. I am not blessed in the hair department.

[00:30:55] Jim Beach: Well, me either. Me either. Uh, we’ll just have to live with [00:31:00] that. So you’re probably more, uh, you’re totally bald shaving. I, I haven’t gotten there yet. I’m still too afraid to do that. So, uh. I’ll have to

[00:31:10] Matt Jones: look. I always say when we, when we started four pillars, we were three at the time, mid forties bald white men, and I always said it was our insurance policy that made sure our, we kept our premium stand for Keyman insurance by looking basically interchangeable, the three of us.

[00:31:27] Matt Jones: And um, yeah.

[00:31:28] Jim Beach: Well I am though on the website and I do see the picture all of you standing around, so, uh, one of the guys has a pretty nice beard here. I see. So.

[00:31:39] Matt Jones: Yeah, that was huge. Trying to change things up now and again, but, uh, yeah, we were mostly, uh, mostly, mostly interchangeable humans, but luckily with quite different skill sets.

[00:31:47] Matt Jones: But we will, we will get into that, no doubt.

[00:31:50] Jim Beach: Alright, so how did you end up starting a gin company? That seems like a pretty risky things to do for a brand guy. [00:32:00]

[00:32:01] Matt Jones: Look it, it. I and I about like most. New business startups. It really began not with a, not with a big idea, but with a decision. It was a decision over a few gin and tonics with, um, these two friends, Stu and Cam, they, they had both spent about a decade in the, the alcohol industry.

[00:32:25] Matt Jones: They’d both been working in wine. They both, they both, I would say were much more professional drinkers than me. You know, they, they, they knew more about alcohol, about booze, about martinis, about, about gin, about spirits in general. I, as you say, came at this world from the perspective of being someone who’d been advising other businesses on how to build brand.

[00:32:46] Matt Jones: And we can talk a little bit in a minute maybe about what makes great brands great. So I just loved the idea. They love the idea of making gin. I love the idea of getting to try out some brand theories. I think there comes a point in every entrepreneur’s [00:33:00] life, whether they’re a deliberate or existential entrepreneur, and they go, you know what?

[00:33:03] Matt Jones: I’ve watched other people try this. I wanna back myself and, and try some of the, my ideas and, and, and my approaches. So it really was just a decision. And then like so many businesses, one decision leads to a snowball of other decisions. And before you know it, you’re running a national and then global chin business.

[00:33:21] Matt Jones: But really it was just a decision made outta the excitement of trying something and, and perhaps, you know, feeling that you could do things a little bit differently in a category that had not seen a lot of change in a hundred years. Why is four Pillars a great brand? Okay, well that’s, that’s, that’s the multimillion dollar question, right?

[00:33:42] Matt Jones: And I think to answer that, you’ve gotta start, and this is something I’d love all of our listeners today to think about, gotta understand that fundamentally brands do not exist. This is really at the center of my, my book and my, my sort of thinking businesses [00:34:00] exist. Products exist. So Four Pillars is a gin production business.

[00:34:04] Matt Jones: We’ve got a beautiful big distillery just outside of Melbourne in, in Australia’s state of Victoria, right at the heart of lovely rolling hills and food and wine country. Four Pillars makes a product. In fact, we make a variety of products. They’re all gins. We only make gin, but we make a very diverse range of, of modern and Australian gins.

[00:34:26] Matt Jones: So four Pillars exists as a business and a product. The reason we need the language of brand is because there is a gap for every business between the value that business creates in the world and the value you create in people’s minds. Brand is the language we use to describe the value we create in people’s minds.

[00:34:45] Matt Jones: The way that we make people feel. If Four Pillars has a craft, the craft of making gin, our brand is about making sure we get the credit for that craft. So the simple answer to your question, what makes Four Pillars a great brand is we have been very good [00:35:00] over the past 12 years at making people feel something.

[00:35:03] Matt Jones: Making people feel that we are passionate, creative explorers of this world of flavor that Gian offers to people. That’s what the brand’s about the brand is about feeling, and I think that’s the same for everyone listening to this show today. Your brand is simply a word you use to describe how you make people feel.

[00:35:23] Matt Jones: And strong brands make people feel something deep and powerful and motivating. How is it better than tan ray? Both in taste and brand. Okay, great question. So, tanker Ray is one of the giants, one of the, the original heroes of what I would call the London Dry Gin scene. A brief history of gin for anyone who is, you know, listening to this and is more of a vodka fan or more of a dark spirit, maybe a bourbon or a whiskey drinker, a rye drinker.

[00:35:55] Matt Jones: Gin is basically distilled juniper. Great gin, [00:36:00] smells like a pine forest. Bad gin can smell and taste a little bit more like toilet cleaner. But it’s that really piney pine fresh juniper, um, aroma, uh, that comes from the beautiful little juniper berry. Originally it was made by the Dutches spirit called Heva back in the 16 hundreds, and the, the British took it in the 17 hundreds and started to simplify it and so great London dry jean brands, people would know, like Gordon’s beef eater and tanker, as you say.

[00:36:30] Matt Jones: Really, they’re very, very focused. Juniper heavy products. In the 1980s, June had gone very, very stale. It had become a little bit of a tired category. We saw the rise of Bombay. Sapphire Ade decided to create a new product, a premium product called Tank Parade, number 10, which they’ve now simply rebranded.

[00:36:49] Matt Jones: Number 10. And then in the 1990s, a great brand came along called Hendrix, and they made gin more modern. They made gin more cucumber. Anyone who’s seen a, a friend walking [00:37:00] away from the bar with a big flag of cucumbers sticking outta gin and tonic. Probably Hendrix in that glass, but no one had really pushed the boundaries of flavor in gin.

[00:37:09] Matt Jones: And for any of your listeners who’ve been to Australia, and you shared with me before the show, Jim, that you’ve, you’ve been to Sydney and, and, and you may remember, we have a pretty incredible and diverse flavor culture here. Australia’s favorite famous strips coffee. The famous Australian flat, white, famous from breakfast, but also Australian cities are full of Mediterranean cultures and Asian cultures.

[00:37:30] Matt Jones: So really what we focused on at four Pillars was never making a London dry gin. We always use juniper, but then we pack flavor into our gins. We use whole fresh citrus, whole fresh oranges. We make gins with Shiraz wine grapes. We make gin with olive oil in there. We make gins designed to pack. Your drinks with flavor, and that’s fundamentally what makes the product so different, and the brand simply brings all that color and flavor to life, or at least I hope it does.

[00:37:59] Jim Beach: I [00:38:00] thought that the clear liqueurs liquors were supposed to be a base kind, like a neutral base, and then you added the mixer, the taste to it. It was just there to get you drunk, not taste too bad, and then you added flavor on, on top, like the tan ray and tonic, or you know, any of the mixers. My parents were big.

[00:38:21] Jim Beach: Gin drinkers, but they had 10 or 15 different gin drinks, but they all had the same gin base.

[00:38:30] Matt Jones: I think, I think you’re spot on. And I think in many ways what you’ve described is, is what has driven the vodka category for such a long time, which, you know, you, you articulate beautiful, I’d probably call it neutrality, a very neutral spirit that that added the alcohol to your drink.

[00:38:45] Matt Jones: And then you could build flavor on top. But people are looking to, to drink differently. They’re looking to drink more. Interestingly, whether it’s the, the incredible boom in spritz culture now with things like the apparel spritz from Italy. Or whether it’s the boom in Margaritas. [00:39:00] You know, again, classic tequila is, is a clear spirit.

[00:39:04] Matt Jones: Mezcal is a clear spirit, but they bring so much flavor that that smokiness of mezcal, that that beautiful, those are Garvan notes from tequila. I think people are now looking to be more. Adventurous with how they drink and ask their spirit to bring more than just, uh, just the alcohol to the party, but to bring, to bring flavor, mad, feel, texture.

[00:39:25] Matt Jones: And the martini in many ways is the ultimate example of that. A very pure, beautiful drink, but which can be just incredibly expressive and an interesting made in the right way with the right gin.

[00:39:37] Jim Beach: So right now we’re seeing an explosion of celebrity liquors. I guess that started when George Clooney sold his.

[00:39:44] Jim Beach: S liquor business. I think he made 700 million or something like that. The rumor mill says, and now every celebrity seems like they have a, a liquor company. Even, you know, the Rock has Terra, something like that.

[00:39:58] Matt Jones: It does,

[00:39:59] Jim Beach: [00:40:00] yes. Yes. The Rock has its own flavor now.

[00:40:04] Matt Jones: There, there you, you, you can drink distilled rock.

[00:40:07] Matt Jones: And you’re right. The ca casamigos, the, the, the George Clooney tequila is, is definitely the celebrity liquor that, that that fired the starting gun on, on that, that sort of explosion of, of, of celebrity plays in the space. I think fundamentally that, that comes back to something that, that I see in, in, in every category.

[00:40:28] Matt Jones: And this is something I talk about a lot in my book. You can think very clearly about the business you want to build. You can then throw yourself at making the best possible products and wrapping the best possible brand and storytelling around that. But the critical third ingredient to any business is how you then.

[00:40:48] Matt Jones: Share that with the people who are gonna matter to you, how you’re gonna drive growth, growth of awareness, growth of distribution, um, how you are gonna sort of flex that business [00:41:00] muscle. And the world is becoming an increasingly difficult place to gain attention. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to cut through.

[00:41:08] Matt Jones: You and I clearly, we talked about our baldness. We are old enough to remember the days when life was simpler. Most people were watching a, a handful of, of network TV channels. They were reading a handful of print media. We could reasonably predict where and how we could speak to people where, and how we could reach people.

[00:41:28] Matt Jones: We knew the physical aisles of the stores that our gin would be ranged on. We, we, we had great. Clarity, great certainty. Now, the world is hugely fragmented, hugely difficult, hugely noisy. People’s attention spans are shutting down, and it doesn’t matter whether you are running a service business, whether you’re running a software business, whether you are running a gene business, gaining attention and cutting through is becoming increasingly hard.

[00:41:52] Matt Jones: Sharing your story is increasingly hard and a simple cheat code. To use a gamer term, a simple cheat code for that [00:42:00] is to have a celebrity sort of punching that wall down and gaining that attention. It is not the only way to do it, but I think it’s very clearly a response that a lot of people are seeing to the challenges of cutting through in a noisy landscape, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s gin.

[00:42:16] Matt Jones: Or skincare or perfume, you know, every week a a, a distant branch of the Kardashian family launches a new skincare brand or whatever it may be. Exactly. People I was thinking of, it’s a way of cutting through.

[00:42:28] Jim Beach: Oh yes, I was thinking of them and all their underwear and cosmetic brands and stuff. So what about the fact that liquor consumption, wine, beer, uh, spirits is decreasing across the board?

[00:42:43] Jim Beach: My, I have. Four kids and two of them are in their twenties. They barely drink at all. And I think their, their groups don’t drink very much. I just think drinking is less popular now than it used to be. Uh, what have you heard about this, [00:43:00] the marketplace as a whole, decreasing, and how do you fight when you have to deal with celebrities and a decreasing market size?

[00:43:07] Matt Jones: This is a huge question. It’s a very interesting question because it it, it speaks to the role of category dynamics. Every, every business exists within a category, and the easiest way for your business to grow is for your business to be in a category that is seeing explosive growth. We were very fortunate when we launched four Pillars in 2013.

[00:43:27] Matt Jones: Gin was in a boom, and particularly here in Australia. Australian produced gin was an incredible boom. When four pillars started making gin here, there were fewer than 22 0 Australian made gins on the market, but 2023 there were over 300 Australian-made gins in the market. And by that, and by that stage four pillars was in 30 markets worldwide.

[00:43:48] Matt Jones: As you kindly said, we’ve been named the world’s best year producers three times. Um, and, and we had momentum. But of course the 301st. Gene business entered that category, was [00:44:00] entering a category that was now cluttered, and as you rightly observe, seeing quite profound shifts in terms of drinking dynamics, younger people drinking less.

[00:44:09] Matt Jones: So two things become really critical. The first is ideally be lucky. You know, if this is, if this is a conversation for people who are interested in the startup world and are playing in the startup world, there is no substitute for serendipity. If you are lucky enough to enter a category at the right time, enjoy the growth.

[00:44:27] Matt Jones: But secondly, because we can’t always control our luck. We need to position for where the world is at. So at Four Pillars, we focused on building a brand around the notion of quality, not quantity. We said we want to help people drink better, not more. So we positioned our brand. For a world where people were gonna be more choiceful and deliberate about the lower number of drinks they had.

[00:44:50] Matt Jones: We weren’t necessarily betting on scale. We didn’t mind the fact the category was growing. In fact, that was fantastic, but we positioned our brand to take advantage of [00:45:00] different dynamics, and I think that’s the really important thing for your listeners to think about. Not just, where is the world today?

[00:45:05] Matt Jones: Not just how am I gonna thrive when the category is moving in my favor, but what is my long-term positioning against potentially some category dynamics that don’t look as, don’t look as positive for everyone? How do I win an unfair share of a shrinking category? Not just how do I win my fair share of a growing category?

[00:45:27] Jim Beach: So a lot of entrepreneurs ask me how to come up with a brand, and my default answer is, find a URL that you can buy and then make that your brand. Because the URL is just so important, uh, how do you come up with a great brand?

[00:45:42] Matt Jones: So I think your, I think your question really there is how’d you come up with a great brand name?

[00:45:46] Matt Jones: Right. And I like the url. The

[00:45:48] Jim Beach: url. I’m gonna name my company that.

[00:45:51] Matt Jones: I’m, I’m gonna, I’m gonna give you two thoughts on URL strategy ’cause I love that this is, this is the, the Jim Beach shortcut to a great brand. Find a [00:46:00] URL you can own and you can live with. I support that 100% and I’ll say two things about it.

[00:46:05] Matt Jones: First, there is no such thing as a good brand name. Google, Facebook, apple are not good brand names. Tesla is not a good brand name. That was just the name of a now dead scientist. Apple is a fruit. Google is a shortening of a big number. Facebook is just a clumsy port Monto term, but those names have been made great over time.

[00:46:28] Matt Jones: By the building of those brands, there is definitely. A bad brand name. There is a brand name that you feel the need to overexplain or apologize every day. So your point about finding a URL you can own and you can live with that is not actively in your way. Then go for it and start to build meaning into it.

[00:46:47] Matt Jones: You build a great brand by building meaning into it. One of the things that. I remember in the early days of the, the digital economy and, and the e-commerce boom is people tried to own the Euro [00:47:00] names for things that were very literal. So they would go, well, I’m gonna own taxis.com, and every time someone wants to find a taxi, they’ll come to me.

[00:47:08] Matt Jones: Well, Uber had something to say about that. I’m gonna own seek.com, and every time someone wants to find something on the internet, they’ll come to me. Well, Google did something about that, so. Don’t necessarily try and own the most descriptive name because again, back to the conversation we had about brand, brand is about how you make people feel something.

[00:47:27] Matt Jones: So if you find a name that is aligned to a URL that you can own, that you can live with, it might not mean something yet, but it doesn’t get in your way, and now you can build meaning and build feeling into it. Then get on with the job and don’t worry too much about finding the perfect name because it doesn’t exist.

[00:47:44] Matt Jones: And if it does exist, probably someone else is parked on that URL instead.

[00:47:48] Jim Beach: What about the brand? What does this business do, Matt? Let me ask Pod 24 POD 20 four.com, URLI [00:48:00] own. What does that brand do?

[00:48:03] Matt Jones: Well, I’m gonna guess that POD 24 is somewhere in the business or the economy of podcasting. It might be a, it might be a production business, it might be a consulting business, it might be a, a syndicate.

[00:48:15] Matt Jones: Um, you’d have to tell me the story of what it does, but that’s where my brain, that’s the territory my brain goes to.

[00:48:21] Jim Beach: And what does 24 make you think of?

[00:48:25] Matt Jones: Makes me think it’s always on.

[00:48:27] Jim Beach: Yeah, that’s right. So it’s a. It’s a radio with different channels of podcasts and they’re always playing, and if you want to go to a liquor button, you click liquor and there’s 24 shows playing nonstop about liquor One after another, like a TV station might do it.

[00:48:48] Matt Jones: And I think what’s beautiful about that example is your name is just, it’s a bit like handing a business card. It’s an opportunity to tell people a story. So what I have always said, and [00:49:00] you know, I’ve, I’ve done a lot of work over the years, other liquor categories like wine, your name, the label on your bottle is all just.

[00:49:06] Matt Jones: Prompts to start to tell a story. Does your name help you tell the story you want to tell? You’re running a plumbing business, you’re running a software business, you’re running a professional services business. Whatever it is that you are doing, does your name feel like the perfect you to then tell people the first story you would like to tell them?

[00:49:26] Matt Jones: And if your name helps you do that, fantastic.

[00:49:29] Jim Beach: How have you gotten international growth in new markets for the Gen four pillars?

[00:49:37] Matt Jones: So what’s really important for any business is to have what I call a growth theory. You need to be very clear on not just the fact that you want to grow. Ambition is not a strategy.

[00:49:48] Matt Jones: We wanna be a global brand is not a strategy. You need to have a. Clear growth theory. And to do that you need to understand the dynamics of the market and the category and, and how that’s gonna change as [00:50:00] you grow. So in, uh, domestic market, Australia, we really attacked every possible avenue, every possible way to drive growth.

[00:50:10] Matt Jones: So we built what you would call a traditional liquor business working with, um, liquor distributors to go into, um, into. Wine stores, liquor stores, supermarkets, as well as into bars and hotels and restaurants. We also built a very, very powerful social media engine driving social and e-commerce. We also built our own physical home, a beautiful distillery that you can come and visit.

[00:50:35] Matt Jones: Um, and we have about 200,000 visitors every year come to four pillars, to, to taste and to have masterclass. So we’ve got really what you would call a multi-channel strategy when it comes to export markets, including coming to the, the wonderful United States, which actually we very quickly learned is not one market, but is 50 individual state markets.

[00:50:55] Matt Jones: We had to, in each of them, understand the nature of that market. How do [00:51:00] people in North Carolina buy their liquor? How do people in Georgia buy their liquor? What are the different rules that govern liquor sales in New York City? And in each of those markets, we had to pick up a distributor. We had to engage that distributor.

[00:51:13] Matt Jones: Get them to believe in four pillars. Demonstrate to them that our product could add value to their portfolio, and then work with them to do our job as the brand owner, which is to build brand and build demand and let them do their jobs, which was to translate that demand into supply. And relationships and ongoing growth.

[00:51:30] Matt Jones: So we had to do that around the world market by market. We ended up in just over 30 markets worldwide from the Middle East and Africa, through Europe and into Asia and into into North America, and, and obviously across the United States. But really it is hand to hand combat. And it was one of the, the hardest things about growing this business, this realization that while the world is now globalized and in theory very connected, but the liquor industry like so many industries is still a boots on the ground people industry.

[00:51:59] Matt Jones: [00:52:00] So you had to be willing to roll up your sleeves, wear out the shoe leather on your, on your shoes. Do the work and, and sort of hit the streets alongside distributors. So really it was market by market, hand to hand combat and understanding that each market has a unique relationship with, with liquor and liquor sales.

[00:52:16] Jim Beach: I have to think that everyone in the South agrees with me that the first thing that comes to mind when we hear four pillars is the movie Gone with the Wind. Um, every house, a Georgian House has four pillars in front. Our Federal Reserve Bank, you’re not allowed to have pillars in a Federal Reserve bank because they’ve decided that it’s a a terrorist threat.

[00:52:39] Jim Beach: Our bank has four pillars in front of it in Atlanta because. Buildings in Atlanta have pillars, usually four of them, and that’s immediately where a southerner is gonna go. Gone with the wind. Have you ever heard that?

[00:52:52] Matt Jones: Yeah. I, I certainly have, and, and it resonates with the reason why we chose the, we chose the brand name.

[00:52:59] Matt Jones: We just thought [00:53:00] four pillars was something that talked to the notion of simplicity and excellence and stability. And we said, well, look, just anything that’s built on four pillars is solid. And so we’re just gonna focus our gin making on doing four things really well. We’re gonna get the best June making equipment we can.

[00:53:19] Matt Jones: They’re called stills. They’re like very expensive. Rolls Royce Kettles, great botanicals, great water, and just great craft. And so those four pillars are what go into everything we make. How do we get in touch? Find out more. So, uh, lessons from Gin is available, uh, from all good books, still certainly available on Amazon, around the world.

[00:53:37] Matt Jones: Um, you can follow me on LinkedIn. Um, check out my website, big story experience.com, and uh, yeah, grab the book and, uh, let me know what you think.

[00:53:45] Jim Beach: Great. Thank you so much for being with us, Matt Jones. You are fantastic and we would love to have you back. We are out of time and thank you all so much for being with us.

[00:53:52] Jim Beach: We’ll be back tomorrow. Go make a million dollars by now.