Market Core · Content · Module
Pillars
The few subjects the organisation keeps returning to and wants to be known for — chosen so that a body of work accumulates into a position rather than into a stream of unrelated pieces.
The idea
How it works
A pillar is a subject the organisation intends to be associated with, not a category it happens to publish in. The difference shows in what it excludes: a real pillar makes some obvious, popular, well-performing piece the wrong thing to make.
Three or four is the working number, for the same reason it is the working number everywhere else in the framework. Attention accumulates by repetition, and a subject visited twice a year is a subject nobody connects to you.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Start from what you can credibly own
The intersection of what the audience needs, what the organisation actually knows, and what competitors are not already saying better. Two of the three is not enough.
- 02
Write what each pillar rules out
A pillar that excludes nothing is a category. Naming the well-performing thing it makes wrong is what turns it into a decision.
- 03
Keep it to three or four
Every addition halves the repetition each subject gets. A fifth pillar is usually a topic that lost an argument.
- 04
Check the last quarter against them
Sort what was actually published into the pillars. Whatever will not sort is the finding, and there is always more of it than expected.
One level in
The components of pillars
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
The distribution
How published work actually divides across the pillars, and what will not sort into any of them.
Learn
Sort last quarter’s output into the pillars. What refuses to sort is the real editorial strategy, and nobody chose it.
The other modules in content
Formats
What the organisation actually produces, and what job each format is doing — which audience, which stage, and what it is meant to change.
LearnProduction
What each piece costs to make, including the research, review and approval that dominate the total — and how much the organisation can actually get out of the door.
LearnThe calendar
The publishing rhythm, what is scheduled against it, and the fixed points in the year worth planning around — set at what can be held through a difficult quarter.
LearnReuse and lifespan
How long each piece stays useful, and how much of it can become something else — because the cheapest content is almost always something that already exists.
Learn