Revision

‘Content Marketing’ Is a Dead End

To build a strong brand, think more like a media property and less like a content marketing operation

Herbert Lui
Marker
Published in
4 min readNov 16, 2021

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Beethoven’s Vision (1882) by Rudolf Hausleithner (Austrian, 1840–1918)/Artvee

The best “content marketing” — if you can call it that — looks like Yeezy, Pokémon, and Goop. In other words, it’s a core part of the business and product, and it’s not at all what most conventional content marketing looks like today.

For example, Yeezy might not have a blog, because each of Kanye West’s album releases and rollouts serve as valuable promotion for the clothing. I’ve never heard of anyone considering an episode of Pokémon content marketing, even though technically the show is a core engine of how it promotes its characters. People then buy video games, action figures, cards, and such. And — while Goop’s piece on energy healing was criticized by the scientific community, it explores modern love and sex in its latest documentary with Netflix, promoting and developing its wellness business in the process.

ROI is Meaningless without Vision

In the several years I’ve worked with software companies, I’ve participated as an independent freelance writer, an in-house editor-in-chief, and eventually as an editorial director. The least successful of these come with the intention…

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Herbert Lui
Marker
Writer for

Covering the psychology of creative work for content creators, professionals, hobbyists, and independents. Author of Creative Doing: https://www.holloway.com/cd