What Is Content Strategy Innovation?

It’s important that we begin resetting our notions of content’s function in business. For the businesses I’ve talked with, the challenge was never “How are we ever going to create enough content?” It was, rather, “How the hell are we going to manage the deluge of content we are creating?”

If businesses stopped to consider why they’re creating all that content in the first place, the deluge would certainly slow.

That is a disruptive concept in the marketing world.

Speaking of disruption, the December, 2015 issue of Harvard Business Review includes an article co-written by one of my favorite business thinkers, Clayton Christensen. His article, What Is Disruptive Innovation?, updates readers on the status of disruption theory (introduced two decades ago) even as it reminds us of what this theory explains – and doesn’t:

“Disruption theory does not, and never will, explain everything about innovation specifically or business success generally. Far too many other forces are in play, each of which will reward further study. Integrating them all into a comprehensive theory of business success is an ambitious goal, one we are unlikely to attain anytime soon.”

Disruptive innovation is an evolving theory, one that is “in danger of becoming a victim of its own success” and “widely misunderstood … its basic tenets frequently misapplied.”

The methodologies and best practices of content marketing, content strategy, and intelligent content as strategic parts of a customer experience strategy are in a similar space: widely misunderstood and evolving. Content as part of an overall business strategy has no done state. There is no finish line. It’s a process. No approach will ever explain everything there is to know about content and its effective management. We know what we know only because we keep moving, striving to improve, seeking to understand distinctions, learning from our failures and successes.

With “cause for hope,” Christensen and his co-authors point out that “as an ever-growing community of researchers and practitioners continues to build on disruption theory … we will come to an even better understanding of what helps firms innovate successfully.” I share Christensen’s sentiment of hope in the kindred area of content strategy in marketing. I point to you, the practitioners of content. You are the true innovators who will lead the profession to more evolved practices and theories.

You will further the ideals of content strategy innovation.

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Robert Rose

Chief Strategy Officer at The Content Advisory

As the Chief Strategy Officer of The Content Advisory, the exclusive education and consulting group of The Content Marketing Institute, Robert develops content and customer experience strategies for large enterprises such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Oracle, McCormick Spices, Capital One, and UPS.

Robert’s book, Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing was called “a call to arms and a self-help guide for creating the experiences that consumers will fall in love with.” For the last three years, he’s co-hosted the podcast This Old Marketing, with Joe Pulizzi. It’s frequently a top 20 marketing podcast on iTunes and is downloaded more than a million times every year, in 100 countries around the world.