when your content marketing plan falls apart, consider kintsugi

Why this Japanese practice can help you repair your content strategy — and how we did it ourselves.

This article originally appeared on the Bizstory Content blog in May 2020.

Kintsugi is a Japanese practice you may know of, even if the name is not familiar.

It is the art of reassembling and repairing broken ceramics with gold, celebrating the breakages as part of the object’s history as opposed to something to be hidden.

The end result is a beautiful new work, threaded with gold and carrying unique value and meaning — proof that breakages and flaws can make an object stronger and more valuable, if an artist is willing to devote time to its repair. 

This is the analogy you should think of when returning to your content marketing strategy in times of crisis:

When the plans you had fall apart all of a sudden, when the work you’d already created is abruptly irrelevant, and your knee-jerk reaction is to throw it in the trash -
Consider how you can repurpose and reassemble the pieces with golden threads
to give your content value again.