Does Your Content Sound Like a Brochure?

Nine years ago, not long after I started Blacfox, I approached a good friend who happened to be the CEO of a fast-growing managed security services provider headquartered in Johannesburg. His company was profitable, growing, and in a strong position to do more with its voice in the market. He agreed to let me help.

I flew up and presented a structured plan. It covered how to take everything they knew about their market and their product, and turn it into content that would attract the right audience, build trust, and eventually convert that trust into revenue. I had done the work properly. The plan was clear.

After the first meeting, his marketing team looked bewildered. These were smart, experienced people who had been marketing successfully for years. But something about what I was proposing was landing for them as half-foreign, half-suspicious.

I called a few weeks later to check on progress. The CEO said they needed another meeting. I flew back. After the second session, they looked even more confused than after the first. And I count myself a reasonable communicator.

On the plane home, I asked myself what had gone wrong. The plan was solid. The logic was clear, at least to me. The team was capable. What I eventually understood is the thing I want to tell you about today.

The sticking point was philosophical, not technical.

They could not see why a security-focused technology company should publish content that did not talk about security technology. The notion that you would invest time, money, and creative energy into producing material that said nothing about what you sold struck them as absurd. They are not unusual. This is the single most common reason companies fail at content strategy, and it is why so much of what gets published reads, unmistakably, like a brochure.

Two functions. Once you see them, you cannot unsee them.

All content does one of two things.

The first is to serve. Content that serves is valuable to the reader independent of your product. It addresses a problem the reader genuinely cares about. It teaches something. It reframes something. It gives the reader something they can use whether or not they ever buy from you.

The second is to recommend. Content that recommends connects your product to the reader’s recognised need. It says: here is the problem you are trying to solve, and here is how our thing fits that problem.

Marketers have terms for these. Top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel. Fine enough words, but they obscure what is actually happening, which is the difference between giving and asking. Serving gives. Recommending asks.

Every commercial instinct pulls you toward the second. Of course it does. You are paying for the content. You have a product to sell. You have a sales cycle to feed. The whole reason you are doing this is to move revenue. Why would you produce content that does not directly move revenue?

Because recommendations without trust are noise.

Think about the last time someone you barely knew recommended a restaurant to you. You probably ignored it. You had no basis for trusting them. No sense of their palate. No idea whether their standards matched yours. Now think about the last time a friend whose taste you trust said, you should try this place. You probably went.

The recommendation was the same. The trust was different. The trust changed everything.

This is how content works. A brand that has done nothing to build trust cannot skip ahead to recommending and expect it to land. A beautifully designed landing page, arriving cold, is a restaurant tip from a stranger. It does not matter how compelling your value proposition reads on paper. If the audience has no reason to trust you, the recommendation is just more noise in a world already thick with it.

Why brands have it harder

Individuals can earn trust through serving content in a way that feels natural. A writer posts good essays for years, builds a readership, and eventually writes about their book. The readers buy the book because they already trust the writer.

When a brand tries the same sequence, something changes. People are more sceptical of brands offering free advice. They suspect a pitch behind every helpful article. They scan the first paragraph looking for the hidden product mention, and the moment they find it, the trust transaction collapses.

This means the distinction between serving and recommending has to be sharper for brands than for individuals. Serving content produced by a brand that smuggles in product mentions reads as a brochure. Every time. And the reader knows what a brochure is for.

So what on earth do you talk about?

Here is where my friends in Johannesburg got stuck, and where most companies get stuck. If your serving content cannot mention your product, what is left?

The discipline has a name. Topic design. It is the single hardest thing about content strategy, and the reason two meetings with a capable team were not enough.

You are looking for subjects where the audience’s genuine interest overlaps with the territory your product lives in, without the content itself pointing at the product. Your serving content must address something real in the buyer’s life. Something they think about. Something they struggle with. Something that, if you said it well, they would share with a colleague.

Let me make this concrete. Imagine you sell workforce scheduling software to logistics companies. Your serving content does not talk about your software. It talks about what dispatchers actually deal with. An article about the hidden cost of Monday morning chaos. A post about what happens when a driver calls in sick an hour before their shift. A short video on the real reason certain depots consistently under-deliver against their SLA.

None of that content points at the product. All of it lives in the world the product serves. A dispatcher reading it thinks: this person understands my life. That is the trust transaction beginning.

Every commercial instinct will pull you toward mentioning the product. Resisting that pull is the whole of content strategy.

The part most teams miss

I want to come back to my friend’s company in Johannesburg, because the story has a second act that teaches something important.

A few months after our two meetings, I called the CEO to ask how things were going. He told me, with some satisfaction, that his head of marketing had implemented the plan. Progress was being made. Content was going out.

I was pleased. Then I looked at their social media.

Nothing had changed. The same product-focused posts. The same company announcements. The same brochure language, adapted for a social feed. There was a technical uptick in volume, but no meaningful shift in what was being produced.

He thought they had done it. They had not.

This is the part that surprised me, and the reason I am writing this piece. Content strategy is so different from how most companies think about marketing that someone can sincerely believe they are following the framework while doing nothing of the sort. The belief is real. The execution is still a brochure.

The reason is simple enough. When your team sits down to produce a piece of content, the instinct to mention your product returns. It has been there for years. It is the habit that built the business. And the habit does not dissolve because you read a framework or sat through two meetings. It dissolves through repeated, deliberate practice and a leader who checks the work against a simple test.

The test

Before the next piece your team ships, ask a single question. Is this serving, or is it recommending?

If it is recommending, fine. Recommending content has its place, and a healthy content strategy has both. Send it.

If it is meant to be serving, and there is a product mention anywhere in it, you have your answer. The team has slipped back into the brochure. Send it back.

That test, applied consistently, does more than any amount of training. The issue is never understanding. The issue is always the pull.

The deeper point

Content strategy is where most commercial efforts die. Not because the concept is hard, but because the discipline to stay out of the brochure is harder than anyone expects.

The work behind good serving content is listening. You cannot design topics that matter to a buyer unless you have listened long enough to know what matters. The Monday morning chaos. The driver who calls in sick. The under-delivering depot. Those are not ideas a marketing team dreams up in a conference room. They are things the buyer lives with, surfaced through careful attention.

A team that serves before it recommends builds an audience that trusts it. An audience that trusts you welcomes your recommendations, acts on them, and tells other people about them. A team that skips the serving step, or fakes it, is shouting into a room full of people who stopped listening a long time ago.

Before you approve the next campaign, look at what your team is producing and ask yourself the question.

Does this sound like a brochure?

If it does, you already have your answer.

Make it rAIn, KG.