Hero, Hub, Hygiene is a budget model, not a content calendar
Most teams use 3H to categorise what they already made. Its actual job is to decide where the money goes before anything is made.
Quick brief
- Content plans are full of Hub material, thin on Hygiene, and call one expensive asset a Hero.
- The model allocates attention capital across three different jobs: reach, relationship and retrieval.
- Misallocation shows up as high production spend with weak search presence and no cultural moment.
- Allocate budget across the three tiers first, then commission against the allocation.
Three tiers, three jobs
Hero content exists to create a moment — a small number of large, culturally ambitious pieces designed to be talked about. Hub content is the regular, planned output that builds a relationship with people who already know you. Hygiene content answers the questions people are actively searching for, and it is the tier that quietly earns most of the compounding.
The three are not interchangeable, and the failure mode is always the same: teams overproduce Hub because it is the easiest to schedule, starve Hygiene because it is unglamorous, and reclassify a mid-sized Hub asset as a Hero because the budget was approved that way.
The distribution question
Alongside 3H sits a simpler operational rhythm: Pitch, Play, Pounce. Pitch is short-form — the graphics and photographs that keep presence. Play is the planned, longer-form work that rewards attention. Pounce is the reactive move when a cultural moment opens and speed is the entire advantage. A team that only pitches never builds anything; a team that only plays never shows up in the moment.
The cheapest content improvement available to most organisations is not a better Hero. It is finally writing the twenty Hygiene pieces that answer the questions their customers type in every week.
Allocating first
- Decide the split across Hero, Hub and Hygiene as a percentage of the annual budget.
- Commission only against that split; refuse briefs that do not name their tier.
- Measure each tier by its own job — reach for Hero, return visits for Hub, search presence for Hygiene.
- Never judge a Hygiene asset by the metrics you would apply to a Hero.
The bottom line
3H is an allocation discipline. Used as a labelling exercise after the fact, it changes nothing except the vocabulary in the report.
Take last year's content spend and classify every asset into one of the three tiers. The gap between that split and the one you would choose deliberately is your plan for next year.
Sources
- Kris Granger — Storytelling for Brands — Session 3, Arthur Lok Jack Global School of Business (1 Jan 2026)
- Think with Google — The Hero, Hub, Hygiene content framework (1 Jan 2014)