Don't you just love bento boxes
Don't you just love bento boxes
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Let’s talk about bento boxes
Don’t you like bento boxes?
They’re just the cutest, right.
They have little rooms for each type of food.
You can put whatever you like in each room.
In that way, bento boxes are like the Container Store for fish.
Or, I dunno, little sushi dollhouses.
So cute. So detailed. The Chris Ware of cuisine.
The thing I really enjoy about bento boxes is they’re organized with a purpose.
They offer a complete meal.
You’ve got rice. You’ve got meat. You’ve got fish. You’ve got pickled veggies.
A variety of tastes, textures, and food groups.
A place for everything, and everything in its place.
Anyway, it’s all very efficient and easy to transport, whether you’re a busy office worker or a kid in short pants.
Being kids, let’s play with our food.
A bento box for content
Here’s a fun thing to do.
When you’re building any part of a content system, make a bento box.
This bento box will contain everything you, your team, and the larger org needs to know about a particular part of your content system.
Plus: easy to communicate. And cute to boot.
Here, let’s take topics.
A topic, as you’re doubtlessly aware, is itself a container for types of stories.
Consider Robinhood. They’re a good example. And I’ve spent way too much time losing money there, so.
Robinhood is a trading platform. They provide content to educate their users. That content is organized around financial topics. Investing 101, Options Trading, Index Funds, etc.
But if you were building the Robinhood content library from scratch, how would you know what information to include in each topic?
Here are some questions you might ask yourself:
How are we defining this topic?
Do we have a specific goal for this topic?
Does this topic include certain key concepts that we need to define?
Do we have a point of view specific to this topic?
How do we know what would make a good piece of content for this topic?
It won’t surprise you, given the Nippon-ish nature of this email, that one good method for organizing the answers to these questions is a bento box:
Ok very cute now explain this to me
Brand
The org or the product you’re creating content forBrand Themes
The top-level brand messaging. These can be, for example, the pillars from your messaging house or the themes you create in the 12-step brand and content strategy framework. These themes are applied to every part of your content, you’re including them in your topic bento box as a reminder that those themes will be applied throughout every piece of content in this topic.Topic and Definition
By explicitly defining the topic you decrease the opportunity for confusion. This is your opportunity to see what this topic is, and what it isn’t. For example, if you’re creating a content system around personal finance, you might state that your credit topic does not include detailed information about debt (which would be its own topic).Goal
What is the one thing we want to put in the mind of the audience? Consider the topic remote work on the Trello blog. Trello explains that topics like this: “Transform remote work woes into wins with these tips for managing and supporting a distributed team.” So what is the one thing Trello wants to communicate about remote work in every piece of content they make for this topic? Whatever it is, that’s their goal.Key Concepts
What concepts do we want to define, or need to define, for the benefit of ourselves and the audience?Priority Messages
What are the brand messages specific to this topic that we want to consistently reiterate in each piece of content?Story Criteria
What are the must-haves for each piece of content?
Why is this helpful?
When you’re building a content system to scale, you have at least two basic needs:
Communicate the system to your creators, so they’re all singing from the same song book
Communicate the system to your larger org, so they understand how and why your team makes creative decisions
A bento box is just a visually delightful way to communicate your topic criteria.
For you agency folk, these bento boxes would be like mini creative briefs.
It’s not unlike the Business Model Canvas: a way to put everything you need in one place where it’s easily accessible and digestible.
When you’re making or managing a content system, you’ll end up having these bento box one-sheeters for each topic you develop.
Like so:
They’re also made for stacking
If you enjoy the bento box model, you can probably see how the model can be applied at different brand levels.
For example, you can have a bento one step above topics (at the publication level), and a bento one step below topics (at the content level).
Like so:
Make it physical
What I enjoy about the bento boxes is that they take an abstract idea (content system) and make one part of it easily accessible.
And when you’re developing content for an org that hasn’t traditionally been in the business of creating content, it helps to make things easy to understand.
You show people a long slide deck, people’s eyes glaze over.
But you show people a bento box?
Everybody likes a bento box.
And everybody, I mean everybody, loves sushi.
More delightful resources
12-Step Brand and Content Framework
The Essential Guide to Frameworks
The Essential Laws of Creativity
The Creative Problem Solving Reading List
You don’t get it, you’re not the point
Make relationships, not things
How can I help? This is a 100% organic, free-range, desktop-to-inbox newsletter devoted to helping you navigate uncertainty, seek the most interesting challenges, and make better creative decisions in marketing and beyond. Delivery at 6pm ET most Sundays whenever! Your host is Steve Bryant, who is for hire.
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Your enjoyable mileage may vary
I know, I’m getting hungry, too, I’m sorry I’m sorry!
Invest in index funds, kids. Preferably through a low-fee brokerage like Vanguard. This is not investment advice. I am not your father.