Maybe We're Not Ready for Thought Leadership

My recent blog on “Promoting thought leadership” got a lot of comments – most of them focusing not on how to promote thought leadership, but on what constitutes thought leadership in the first place.

In a recent blog Chris Koch at the IT Marketing Services Association suggested that the term “thought leadership” itself is so overused as to be useless. He’s suggesting business to business marketers instead do “Idea Marketing” which involves heavy lifting like actually going out and finding new and useful ideas from your subject matter experts, and distributing them through a publishing process complete with lead tracking and nurturing.

In my experience, most vendors aren’t ready for anything as involved as that. For them, “thought leadership” essentially means any white paper that’s NOT just a laundry list of product features. They are content with pieces that lay out what a customer needs in a product, presented in a way that makes their own “solutions” (mentioned discreetly in the summary) look good. In short, a typical white paper. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not thought leadership.

True leadership means going where no one has gone before, and/or showing others the right path to take when times are uncertain. It implies breaking new ground and meeting needs customers didn’t know they had, like Apple did with the iPhone and Google did with its search engine. That’s a quantum leap beyond what’s hard enough most of the time -- keeping a close eye on customers’ needs and beating the competition in meeting those needs.

A final obstacle to thought leadership is that many customers aren’t ready for it, because they’re still mastering the basics of what the vendor is selling. As one client told me today, “The really smart guys in the room aren’t reading the white papers.” His audience is, instead, the unlucky fellow who’s just been thrown into managing, say, Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance and is trying to figure out how not to get himself or his boss fired.

Someone out there is really tailoring content to where the prospect is in the buying process, sending primers to newbies and real rocket-science stuff to the experts. But from what I see, those leading-edge marketers are still few and far between. 

Comments

[Chris Koch]

Hi Bob,

Well, we can dream, can't we? I agree that most content positioned as thought leadership really isn't. But I also believe that thought leadership is in the eye of the beholder. That Sarbox newbie will view a clear, soup-to-nuts explanation with a point of view about what actions to take as thought leadership and be grateful to the company that provided it. But as you point out, the really experienced people will have already figured it out.

That's why I think it is important to have thought leadership targeted at the different stages of the buying process and tailored to the different audiences you're trying to reach. Another tall order, I know!

But here's the thing. You and I both know that trade journalism is in a long, steady decline. However, the appetite for the kind of thought leadership that journalists provide (think those "news analysis" articles) is still in great demand. Marketers who can fill that void with objective, well researched content will have a bigger edge over competitors than ever before.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

[Bob Scheier]

Thanks, Chris -- actually, later in the day after I posted this I got a call from a client asking, specifically, for me to develop a content plan based on where their prospects are in the sales cycle. Next step was to ask the client to identify how they are segmenting customers, which are the best valuable segments, etc. -- not to mention how marketing will score leads and hand them off to sales. No word back yet -- wondering if I scared them off, but it seems that info is needed to built a good content plan. You agree? Thanks again for your thoughts...

[Chris Stetson]

Bob, I think your desire to know the segments and lead valuation method was wise. But I can imagine a counter-argument. Suppose that a person's information needs depend far more on the purchase-process stage he/she is engaging in than on the person's segment (e.g., job title / company-size pairing). Then perhaps what the content plan needs most is the different types of content appropriate to each stage, not appropriate to each segment. If, for example, the CIO of a large company typically drops out of the specs-determination stage for a product category, then he won't be reading the content for that stage anyway. Similarly, if a lower-level IT staffer is too deeply immersed in minute-to-minute tasks to look for ground-breaking ideas, then the IT staffer won't want to read the thought-leadership material for that product category. In short, sometimes writing for the purchasing-process stage can do as well as writing for the segment.