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Most brands today treat content as either commercial or editorial.
Commercial content is optimized for reach, conversion, and performance. It’s built for mass appeal and helps a brand show up, scale visibility, and build market awareness.
On the other hand, editorial content is rooted in perspective. It’s built for nuance, depth, and interpretation, helping a brand stand for something rather than just show up everywhere.
Commercial content scales attention already validated by the market. Editorial content creates and shapes meaning.
The strongest brands understand that these two modes aren’t opposites; rather, they work together. Market-validated content captures attention and earns visibility. Meaning-making content builds authority and earns belief.
Story becomes the system that holds everything together. I call this the Market-Meaning Matrix.
The Market-Meaning Matrix
The Market-Meaning Matrix is a way to understand how content creates value, not just where it lives.
One axis maps commercial versus editorial. The other maps market-validated versus meaning-making. Together, the matrix shows that the strongest brands don’t choose between performance and perspective. They operate across all four quadrants, using content as infrastructure that compounds trust over time.
Commercial + Market-validated
Content in this quadrant responds to existing demand and is designed to be easily understood, found, and acted on.
Examples include:
Product and feature pages
SEO/AEO/GEO explainers
Comparisons and battlecards
Sales enablement one-pagers
Case studies
Product demos
Email nurture sequences
Paid ad creative and landing pages
Product launch announcements
FAQs and objection-handling content
Primary role: Capture attention, reduce friction, support conversion
Commercial + Meaning-making
Content in this quadrant supports revenue, but reframes how the market understands the category, problem, or solution.
Examples include:
Category narratives and positioning pages
Thought leadership & founder POV
Flagship reports
Product roadmap storytelling
Brand partnerships
Keynote talks
Primary role: Shape perception, align belief with buying
Editorial + Market-validated
Content in this quadrant interprets what’s already happening in the industry and helps audiences make sense of known trends or conversations.
Examples include:
Trend roundups and industry analysis
Newsjacking commentary
Report summaries and explainers
“State of the industry” content
Expert interviews and Q&As
Event coverage and recaps
Primary role: Build relevance, demonstrate fluency, stay top-of-mind
Editorial + Meaning-making
Content in this quadrant introduces new frames, language, or narratives before demand fully exists.
Examples include:
Original essays and cultural analysis
New frameworks and mental model
Hot takes and spiky opinions
Early signal analysis
Founder manifestos
Long-form editorial features
Narrative series
Primary role: Build authority, earn trust, define what the brand stands for
Brands need both commercial and editorial content
Modern brand storytellers need to balance the broad appeal of commercial content built for reach with the specificity of editorial perspective built for nuance.
The more original the content is, the deeper it lies in the Editorial + Meaning-making quadrant. The more run-of-the-mill the content is, the deeper it lies in the Commercial + Market-validated quadrant. Go too far in one direction, and you end up with attention without narrative. Go too far in the other direction, and you end up with a narrative without distribution.
So, to balance commercial and editorial, brands need to think like journalists (find the story), operate like media brands (build systems and infrastructure), and distribute like marketers (know how to earn attention).
The brands that win are the ones that achieve that balance, using story as a system that earns attention, creates meaning, and turns visibility into belief.