In 1889, Buffalo Bill Cody pitched his Wild West show outside the Exposition Universelle in Paris. The official exhibition charged admission. Cody’s show was free.

Which, in marketing terms, makes him either a visionary or the kind of person who brings a kazoo to a symphony orchestra and somehow makes it work.

But here’s what made Cody brilliant: he understood that spectacle alone wasn’t enough. You needed layers.

Like an onion, but with more gunpowder and significantly fewer tears.

(Unless you count the tears of joy from Parisians finally seeing something more exciting than mime artists.)

The outer ring was pure theatre. Cowboys, Indians, buffalo stampedes. Anyone walking past stopped to watch like caffeinated meerkats spotting a particularly dramatic soap opera. Children dragged parents over. Parisians who’d never seen a horse gathered three deep around the arena, probably wondering if this was some sort of elaborate mechanical contraption powered by baguettes and existential dread.

The middle ring was demonstration. Annie Oakley splitting playing cards at thirty paces—which is roughly equivalent to modern marketers actually hitting their quarterly targets while blindfolded and riding a unicycle through a compliance meeting.

The inner ring was connection. After the show, performers mingled with the crowd like highly trained anthropologists studying the wild Parisian in their natural habitat. Sold programmes. Posed for photographs. What began as curiosity became personal experience.

By the time the official exhibition closed, Cody had played to over two million people. He’d turned gawkers into paying customers, and paying customers into lifelong advocates faster than you can say “customer journey optimization”—which, thankfully, hadn’t been invented yet.

The French newspapers called it genius. Cody called it common sense.

(Modern marketing consultants would have charged him €75,000 for a “strategic audience engagement framework” and thrown in a complimentary whitepaper about “leveraging spectacle-driven touchpoints for maximum conversion velocity.”)

The three rings of relevance

Every successful business builds these same concentric circles, whether they realise it or not. Like badgers instinctively knowing how to cross the Mersey—they just do it without requiring a 47-slide PowerPoint presentation about “aquatic traversal methodologies.”

The outer circle attracts. The middle circle convinces. The inner circle converts.

Most marketing gets this backwards with the precision of a drunk penguin attempting ballet. Companies start with the inner circle—what they sell—and wonder why nobody cares. They’re performing Shakespeare to an empty theatre while wondering if they need better stage lighting or perhaps a more compelling costume budget.

Consider how this works in practice, assuming you haven’t already surrendered to the sweet embrace of marketing nihilism.

A cybersecurity company could write endlessly about their threat detection algorithms like academic researchers documenting the mating habits of particularly boring beetles. That’s inner circle content. It converts people already shopping for cybersecurity solutions—both of them, plus Kevin from IT who accidentally clicked the wrong link.

But their most powerful content starts further out, in the land where normal humans actually live:

Outer circle: “Why Your Password Manager Isn’t Enough” attracts anyone worried about online security.

Middle circle: “The Real Cost of a Data Breach” educates business owners about vulnerabilities with the gentle subtlety of a brick through a greenhouse window.

Inner circle: “How One Company Stopped 10,000 Attacks in a Month” demonstrates specific solution value without requiring viewers to have PhDs in digital paranoia.

Each piece works alone. Together, they create a journey from concern to conviction faster than executives can say “but what about our thought leadership strategy?”

Three Principles of Circles (Or: How to Stop Being Terrible at This)

First: Every circle must fascinate on its own merit, like a Renaissance painting that doesn’t require a museum placard to explain why it’s brilliant. Outer circle content about workplace psychology shouldn’t feel like a sales brochure disguised as a TED talk delivered by someone who learned public speaking from watching insurance commercials. Middle circle strategy pieces shouldn’t scream “buy our software” with the subtlety of a fire alarm in a library during exam week.

Second: The journey between circles should feel inevitable, not forced—like gravity, but with better conversion rates. When someone reading about consumer psychology encounters your content about promotional strategy, the connection should seem obvious. Natural progression, not aggressive funnel manipulation that treats prospects like particularly dim laboratory mice being herded through a maze designed by someone with a psychology degree and serious control issues.

Third: Most companies over-index on the inner circle harder than a broken compass pointing due profit. They write extensively about features and benefits while ignoring the curiosity and concern that precede purchase decisions. The outer rings don’t just attract audience—they build the context that makes product content compelling.

(Which would be obvious to anyone who’s ever had a conversation with an actual human being.)

The practical application

Map your content against these three circles like a cartographer documenting territories that may or may not exist:

Outer: What broader conversation are you part of? A project management tool sits within discussions about productivity, team dynamics, workplace culture, and the slow heat death of human motivation in fluorescent-lit offices where dreams go to die.

Middle: What specific problems do you solve? Meeting overload, task visibility, deadline management, and the existential crisis that comes from watching grown adults argue about whether Tuesday works for everyone.

Inner: How do you solve them? Your features, benefits, transformation stories, and the occasional miracle that occurs when software actually does what it promises.

Then audit your current content mix with the ruthless efficiency of a particularly organised serial killer. Most B2B companies produce 80% inner circle content and wonder why engagement stays flatter than a pancake that’s been run over by a steamroller operated by someone who clearly has issues with breakfast foods.

The question isn’t which ring to focus on—it’s creating the right mix without requiring advanced mathematics or a degree in theoretical physics:

• Outer ring builds your audience (the people who don’t yet know they need you)
• Middle ring builds your authority (the people starting to suspect they might need you)
• Inner ring builds your revenue (the people who definitely need you and have credit cards)

Most companies over-index on the inner ring because it feels most directly tied to sales, like a particularly obsessive accountant who can only see numbers and has forgotten that humans are involved in this process somewhere. But without the outer rings, you’re only talking to people who already know they need you.

(Which, for most B2B companies, is approximately fourteen people on a good day.)

The concentric circles aren’t about ranking content from boring to interesting—they’re about understanding that different content serves different purposes in the customer journey. A concept so revolutionary it’s only been around since people started buying things from other people, which is roughly equivalent to the invention of fire but with more spreadsheets and significantly fewer mammoths.

Your job isn’t making product content disappear into the digital equivalent of a witness protection program. It’s ensuring people have reason to care about it by the time they encounter it, like preparing guests for a surprise party except the surprise is that your software actually solves their problems.

Without the outer rings, you’re just another vendor with a dashboard, standing in a crowded marketplace shouting about your obvious brilliance while everyone else is distracted by shinier objects and the promise of free coffee.

This article was written with the assistance of AI.