I recently attended the Four Pillars Lab Experience, and wow! It was engaging, fun, and educational—in-person edutainment at its best.

🤳 Play the Game & Become the Influencer

99% of brands on social media fall into the trap of positioning themselves as brand accounts who need to find and pay influencers to work with them or create content for them.

This mindset positions them as secondary players, dependent on external personalities.

Although that sounds philosophical, it is true and for majority of brands it will not lead to success.

Just need to reposition and play to win.

Brands need to become the influencers. People buy people.

Strategy you can implement immediately to get results:

Your employees are content gems that need to be used.

Imagine you have 100 employees. Different ages, cultures, hobbies, favourite things to do on the weekend.

Where am I getting.

You have 1000s of untapped stories inside your brand already. So before you even thing of ‘influencer strategy’ and dedicating a budget to that. Look inside.

If your were to get your phone out right now and go around to all your employees and ask them three questions:

1. What’s your role here?

2. What’s one piece of advice you would give yourself 5 years ago?

3. What’s your favourite thing to do on the weekend?

Boom.

You have got company related content, aspirational content, fun & relatable content. All in storytelling format that is conversational and easy to consume.

Bonus - your employees feel engaged with as well!

🔎 Four Pillars Case Study

Lets dive into their content.

Currently Four Pillars are only active on Instagram.

Not on TikTok - with the average watch time 100min+ per day for TikTok users. Every brand has got to be posting content there.

Looked at a tool called social blade - free to see any social accounts data analytics and performance. Good for looking at competitors.

Lets look back to most recent spike in followers.

Oct 16th - Oct 23rd 2023

600+ followers in a week. A big spike vs their average followers gained per week before that were 15, 60, 6…

Why?

There were 5 posts during this time.

• 2 Reels

• 2 Single Image Posts

• 1 Carousel (multiple images in one post)

It was a mix of things that were timed well.

Getting close to that Christmas vibe, Four Pillars were building hype to their Christmas Gin.

Which was flavoured ‘Christmas Pudding’… for a gin. It’s different. Unique. Thinking about Christmas pudding makes people happy. So Christmas Pudding Gin is going to make people happy. Post about it. Make people happy seeing it on Instagram.

Great. That is one part of the social media puzzle.

Now for the second part.

Context for the High Performing Post: Intent of Consumer

Of course on the brand page you think: “Okay we want to show our amazing product, high quality imagery, branding. branding. branding”.

There are times when this needs to be done.

But:

Why do people open social media?

To be entertained.

They have a very specific intention for opening the social media apps. Entertainment. Dopamine release. The thrill of watching a story unfold. Amazement of crazy sports clips.

Thats what your competing with.

Think about what you watch or what your kids, friends or family watch.

What is getting shared to the group chat?

Lets do an example.

An image of a new gin flavour HD with colours and nice background.

VS

Regular person (could be you, an employee, friend or family) videoing themselves, “OMG guys I have just seen a new gin flavour released that is limited edition! Lets go buy it”. Then clips of them going to the shops to buy it. Go home. Try the drink and tell you their thoughts along the way.

You could spice it up and add a problem in their like “They ran out at this store so we had to drive 45min to find this gin!”

As a human you are programmed to enjoy the story with a problem and resolution vs the image.

Now we know about intent.

Another thing coded into that great brain of ours is that we feel good when we see other people smiling and happy.

Which is seen in the top performing post during the spike in followers on Four Pillars Instagram.

The best performing post during this week was the carousel of images when Four Pillars the Gin Producer of the Year Award for the third time. It wasn’t photos of the gin, it was all the team together, happy, smiling, and just radiating positive energy through the screen.

People are biologically designed to feel good when we see other people smiling and happy.

Its a guarantee.

So knowing this and seeing that it performs way better than simple product imagery should we not the content which is more engaging, positive, engages your team and shows you are human.

People buy people - It goes back to “I don’t want to be sold to but I do want to buy”. Capture the human moments and stop focusing on trying to only sell the product.

Easy Strategies to Implement Immediately on the back of this:

• Start taking selfies, photos & videos of the team & yourself, whether its working hard, meetings, lunch or random fun moments.

• Videos of people do 10x better than images of product. If you want to show your product please have a person talking in a video with it.

• Tell your founder’s story. Social media, especially video, pushes top of the funnel content to new people. You can never tell why you started too many times. Include multiple people, great if there are multiple founders, also from other perspectives like family and friends watching founders start their brand.

Content Gap: Educational Content

There are 1000s of searches per month on Google for questions about all things gin.

Whats is gin made of? Best things to mix with gin? How to make gin?

You get the point.

To keep it to the point - make educational content. Even as an expert these things seem straightforward there is data showing people are searching these queries.

And Gen-Z uses TikTok more than google now to find answers to their questions. So take whats popular searches on one platform and create it on the other.

Simple video tutorial explain the steps.

Add visually stimulating objects & items to keep retention.

And a positive energy.

That’s it.

Four Pillars Lab Experience

Why it is great.

How I would take it to the next level.

Discovering Four Pillars Gin: A Masterclass Experience

I recently had the pleasure of attending the Four Pillars Lab Masterclass in Surry Hills. I got the full rundown on how Four Pillars started through an engaging performance by one of their brand ambassadors and gin lover named, Sam.

In less than an hour through an edutainment (education + entertainment) styled presentation I learnt so much more than just how gin is made:

1. Resilience Pays Off: The cofounders faced initial setbacks in Australia but didn't give up. Having no idea how to make gin, they traveled to the US to master gin making from scratch.

2. Attention to Detail: The masterclass was meticulously planned. From the stunning venue to the carefully designed tasting sheets, every detail was perfect.

3. Passion for Helping Others: Their success story now fuels their desire to help others. It's truly inspiring.

4. Unique Flavour Profiles: With so many different flavours of gin now. They test, test, test see if there is product market fit and release these limited edition flavours making it feel like a luxury fashion drop.

Four Pillar Lab Events

This is super unique & personal

💡 My Creative Idea for the Four Pillars Lab Experience: Build a Content Machine

"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade… Then film it, edit it, and post it."

Of course being there I had ideas flying through my head. This is where I got to:

Record the whole thing.

1. Mic the Presenter: He was funny, engaging & great at storytelling. The perfect mix for a content creator.

2. Capture the Audience: Place a microphone on each 4-person table and set up a camera for each group. This setup will capture all the fun, engaging moments, interesting questions, and silly questions (thanks to the gin!).

   • Of course ask for permission before doing this with members of the public.

3. Create Content: chop the vids into short-form clips. Get everything, a range of stuff, from funny to educational. You can never tell your founder story too many times.

4. Share it… to everyone: Not only posting clips on four pillars social media, the presenter, if you get other companies to come to the event their social media pages are great (collab post to get even more traction), send it to the individuals who attended, they do not have to have a large following. It only takes one video to change everything.

Implementing this idea will make the Four Pillars Masterclass not just an event, but an experience to remember and share & drive more people to the event.