*One of four parts of my [content research framework](https://vickygu.com/content-research-framework).*
**What:** Hybrid quant/qual cultural insights
**How:** Engaging with communities, inside and outside your industry
**When:** Always on!
**Why:** Enrich your inputs with the unexpected. This quadrant yields award-winning content and puts you on the map of those you aspire to be like.
**Questions to answer:** What's the content that no one's searching for — yet? What's the stuff that's hard to scale? What can you learn from communities that see the world in a different light?
My favorite quadrant is the wild child. Go to industry conferences and meetups, speak up in Discords and Slacks, join your local club for your weird hobby. (Or if you're like me, sit at the bar and write poetry.)
At NewtonX, our Head of Brand & Marketing Jackie Cutrone had the idea to do [a New York Mag-inspired culture matrix](https://nymag.com/tags/the-approval-matrix/), but for B2B research instead of consumer trends. We [brought this to life](https://www.content-technologist.com/visual-concepting-content-strategy/) through the [2023 Insights Matrix](https://www.newtonx.com/insights-matrix-2023/), a fun selling tool that showcased our client partnerships and industry expertise.
For Currant, my food media collective, our editor Sarah Cooke proposed the concept of [Climate, Changed](https://staycurrant.com/climate-changed): a series on climate change through the lens of jam producers. It became a year-long project that took us in original reporting across six producers across the US.
Creating newness requires a long game approach to ROI. These explorations shouldn’t be measured the same way as top-of-funnel lead generation efforts or bottom-of-funnel conversion tactics. Beyond getting eyeballs to your website or pushing them to purchase, wild card initiatives get users to stay, luxuriate, and wander around. They enable your audience to *enjoy* your brand, and yield customer loyalty and retention.
It also requires the right timing. First, build stakeholder trust and organizational credibility so you're insured through uncertainty. Then, ship the weird and watch the waves roll in.