Does your thought leadership have a point of view?

February 13, 2009 by Chris Koch

We at ITSMA a broad, inclusive definition for what constitutes thought leadership. All you want it to be able to do ultimately is spark interest among the people you want to reach with ideas that map with your ability to deliver.

To do this, you need to do research with customers and across your target markets. You also need to cultivate a group of internal subject matter experts to collaborate with customers and third parties to develop and refine a point of view. Finally, you need to implement this with customers so that they can provide corroboration that the idea is valid and practical.

These are the core elements of thought leadership marketing. Think of any of the best articles you’ve read in the Harvard Business Review, for example. Each has:

  1. A relevant business issue of interest to a lot of people
  2. A strong point of view
  3. Grounded in some kind of market research
  4. Validated by case examples

Now, I really don’t think this point of view has to be especially new or creative. It doesn’t have to be something that no one has thought of before. But it has to crystallize a point of view that is of interest to people and makes them stop and think.

Look, Al Gore had nothing new to say about global warming when he did An Inconvenient Truth. But he packaged all that stuff up in a very strong, clear point of view that said that we can’t continue waiting to make the sacrifices necessary to stop all this because if we don’t, we’re going to harm our children. It’s going to be hard to do what we have to do but we have to suck it up and do it now for their sakes.

What I see so often in thought leadership content is that there is no point of view linking it all together like that. At the top, you have broad research surveys and at the bottom, you have case studies of customers implementing a particular solution. But what’s missing is the point of view to take the customer from that broad research down to the case studies, the proof points. There needs to be a link.

I’m going to be giving a presentation next week on how to use thought leadership as a marketing tool during a recession. It’s being hosted by a web conferencing company called BrightTalk. It’s free and I hope you’ll attend. I’ll be talking about how to develop a thought leadership content engine inside your company and how to create a thought leadership dissemination supply chain to develop and refine the ideas and point of views that bubble up through the content engine. Here’s a link to sign up:

http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/2656/attend

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  • I heard a great definition by Dr Chris Barlow of the Co-creativity Institute in a chance encounter while visiting Chicago last year. (http://www.cocreativity.com/staff.html)

    He defined a Thought Leader as that person to whom you would turn if you need an opinion in circumstances of uncertainty where the existing body of knowledge/ facts do not provide answers- not even case studies. A thought leader is therefore MORE than a subject matter expert, its someone you would be prepared to follow in the absence of evidence.I found that a fascinating way of thinking about it and likewise, it brings in the dimension of followership, because I dont think there's any question that in order to be considered a leader, it requires followership.
  • Hi Chris. Interesting debate. Thought leadership or not, it's the "content light" material that has little impact and makes for poor marketing. Whether it's a 100 page white paper, or a 3 line email the content itself has to add some level of value, or what can it possibly hope to achieve?

    You cannot communicate something effectively unless it has substance behind it.

    And yet that's what so many marketers have tried to do in the past. For "thought leadership" read "valuable, useful, actionable content" and things become a lot clearer. Many of us are selling products and services with complex propositions and very long sales cycles. Thus if we don't have something interesting and valuable to say beyond "do you want a CRM system, or some systems integration" we can't guide people to the next step to engage with us. If we map the journey the prospect needs to go on with us, the content challenge becomes a lot easier.
  • Hi Britton,

    Nice suggestion. I think marketing departments could set their own internal scale as you suggest, but again, I think that everything we do needs the rigor of research, strong POV, and proof points to satisfy the reader. The scale might be useful in terms of making internal decisions about how much effort to devote to each idea that you want to put out there. For example, maybe you could take a portfolio approach to your ideas with a range of complexity and time and resources needed to develop them. Try to develop a mix of "hard" and "easy" ideas for development over time. I wouldn't trumpet any of them as thought leadership. You'll be able to tell from the response from readers.
  • Great debate! Personally, I am satisfied with the "eye of the beholder" position. What I would add is that perhaps we can think of thought leadership on different levels.

    Just as Jim Collins has presented the idea of level 1 and level 5 leadership (http://www.jimcollins.com/lab/level5/p2.html), perhaps we could present a continuum of thought leadership. Level 5 thought leaders are the ones who truly break new ground with pioneering ideas and rigorous underlying research to defend them (Rob's position). But those aren't the only only idea merchants that deserve to be called thought leaders (your position).

    Thought leadership could then be judged both in terms of contribution to our body of knowledge and meaningful impact in the marketplace. What do you think?
  • Rob,

    Again, what is wrong here is the arbitrary distinction between good content and thought leadership. The reader is the ultimate judge of what constitutes thought leadership. All we can do is use good practices to develop the best content we have.
  • Hi Chris -- I think you're last paragraph nails it: "few of our companies have much new to say on a regular basis." I agree, and changing that would require a substantially increased investment in ongoing research which is hard for most companies to afford. But let's not make a virtue of seeming necessity by defining thought leadership down and simply equating it with good compelling content. Doing that risks losing any real meaning to the term. I'm all for good compelling content; even if it's not new and innovative, it would be still be a big improvement for many marketing organizations and much more useful for prospective customers. But automatically calling good content "thought leadership," to me, is pretty much the same as calling a company a "leading" company just because they have good offers and capabilities.
  • Rob,

    Thought leadership is in the eye of the beholder. Everyone has his own idea of what constitutes new and innovative. If you did a great job packaging up "why companies need to invest more in internal communications," and developed a strong point of view that people could take to their bosses to get funding, it would be thought leadership to someone out there--perhaps a young marketer just starting out (there are thousands of them) who needs to make a case.

    Frankly, few of our companies have much new to say on a regular basis. But that shouldn't stop us from creating thought leadership just because we aren't going to win the Nobel Prize (like Al Gore). The trick is to create compelling content that mobilizes into thinking and acting a group of people worth mobilizing.
  • Hmm, interesting point of view, Chris. My first reaction was to think that maybe you're right, that Al Gore, among others, is indeed a "thought leader" despite not really having anything new to say.

    Upon reflection, though, I'm less persuaded.

    Gore is certainly one of the most prominent voices on climate change, and others have gained great credibility on issues despite a lack of original thought, but I'd put that down to great packaging and promotion rather than truly innovative thinking on the issues themselves.

    If "thought leadership" is really to be worthy of the name, I'd much rather keep the bar high and look for something new along with the other attributes you cite (relevance, strong point of view, etc.). We can certainly debate the degree of innovation in alleged new thinking, but I'd rather not give that up from the start. Otherwise, we're left with saying that things like "companies need to invest more in internal communications" represents real thought leadership. I can argue this strongly and cogently, show it's relevance, and back it up with research and case studies. No doubt investing more in internal communications is good practice for many companies, especially in times of turmoil like today, but I'd be hard pressed to say that this is any kind of serious new thinking.
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