Matt Jones

Matt Jones is one of Australia’s leading strategists and storytellers when it comes to the intersections of brand, business, leadership, experience, culture, technology, human behaviour and storytelling.

Matt has an eclectic background, combining economics, politics, brand experience and gin.

As one of three co-founders and the brand brains behind Four Pillars, Matt Jones connects the dots between brand and purpose theory and gritty business and delivery reality.

His storytelling is insightful, engaging, energising and highly relatable to all businesses.

He is obsessed with sport, food, photography, wine, film, travel, politics, fiction, architecture, technology, design, hotels, ideas, experiences, cinema, contemporary art, human behaviour, ideas and (yes) gin.

He works in, speaks about, and connects the dots, between all of the above areas and is a former panellist on The Gruen Transfer.

In December 2013, he was one of three founders to launch Four Pillars Gin, which quickly became the number-one-selling craft spirit in Australia. Four Pillars Gin is a small business success story five years in the making.

From 2001 to 2005, Matt was Chief Political Adviser to the UK Conservative Party (the youngest person in the party’s history to hold that role).

In 2006, Matt moved from politics into the brand experience, first in Sydney and then in New York City, as Jack Morton World wides first chief creative and strategy officer.

Between 2006 and 2012, Matt became one of the world’s most influential thinkers in the emerging world of brand experience, helping brands like IBM, Microsoft, Qantas, Sony, Samsung and Volkswagen navigate their way in a new era of socially-connected consumers and experience-led brand building.

In 2012, Matt founded his own consultancy, focused on applying creative strategy, storytelling and experience design to brand and business challenges for corporate, craft, start-up and social businesses.

Matt Jones speaks about:

In Craft We Trust

In our changing landscape nothing could be more important to create, harder to build or easier to lose than trust. Trust is at the heart of your brand and your business success, which is why growing trust and building enduring trust-based relationships needs to be at the heart of your marketing efforts.

Matt Jones has spent his career helping organizations build trust¦from political parties to global brands to his own distillery business, Four Pillars Gin.

Matt’s journey has taught him that the key to building trust is to embrace your craft and create stories and experiences that bring your customers and clients closer to what makes your business special.

In this keynote, Matt explores the secrets of building your craft into every customer experience you deliver, so that the experience of your brand becomes your marketing and your clients become your most powerful form of advertising.

Better Better Better

How to win by focusing on making better products and delivering better experiences and being better for the planet.

In this keynote Matt explores the psychology behind consumer and shopper preferences, demonstrating how our loyalty to brands (from retailers and banks to telcos and gin makers) is influenced by a complex bundle of factors¦our perception of product quality and value, our perception of the experiences wrapped around the product and (more and more) our perception of the sustainability and community values of the brand behind the product. Matt provides tangible examples from across multiple categories of brands pulling all three levers to win¦from retailers to sneaker makers to car brands.

He then demonstrates how Four Pillars has grown to be the world’s leading gin producer (recently named bother Distiller of the Year and Brand Innovator of the Year at the global Gin Magazine Awards) by focusing on all three of these levers. On sustainability, Four Pillars was the first distillery in Australia to achieve carbon-neutral status both for our distillery and all our gins.

Brand Is Bias

How to build brand in a world controlled by the customer

Why You Need to Think about Why?

Business, leadership, innovation and culture through a purposeful lens

Technology, Culture, Community & Communication

Thinking and working differently in a world of disruptive change

Gin & Business

Commercial lessons from the world of craft

The Experience is the Marketing

Winning in the new world of whole-of-business brand building

Influencing Stories

Why business, brand and organisational success begins with storytelling