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14 Jul 2010
Thought leadership is not and should not be a marketing or PR tactic – rather it is a culture. Like companies who innovate, thought leadership too should be a way of doing things.If it is not a function of corporate culture I can guarantee that most long-term thought leadership positions will not get across the starting line. Alternatively the company produces one or two ‘thought leadership’ campaigns a year that become part of the marketing team’s annual list of objectives and kpis and are ticked off as thought leadership but are really just PR campaigns to drive coverage.
The true test of thought leadership
The true test of a thought leadership campaign is to ask the following six questions. Does your thought leadership campaign:
1. Add real value to your public’s lives/decision making/business
2. Position you as a trusted advisor engendering trust in your brand as the leader in that particular sector/area
3. Help underpin sales
4. Provide a content rich platform from which you can write, talk, publish online and share with clients valuable insights
5. Position your people as the experts and ‘go to’ people in their field
6. Move your brand from product and sales leadership to market leadership and in the process delivers long-term, sustainable advantage over your competitors.
If not you should be going back to the drawing board.
Thought leadership tops focus for B2B marketers
In 2009 thought leadership trailed behind email as the area of most significant focus for B2B marketers according to MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog. If marketers are recognising the power of thought leadership and the management consulting industry has been using thought leadership as one of their most important lead generators for over a decade, why haven’t other companies jumped on the bandwagon?
From my experience it comes back to the question of whether it is part of their culture or not. As I have indicated in previous posts, true, long-term, thought leadership campaigns need to align closely with the values of an organisation and needs to have the buy-in and ownership of senior management. Historically, the campaigns that do this fly and those that don’t fail, or at best limp along, never quite realising their true potential.
Thought leadership is about long-term reputation and trust
Unfortunately the pressure on CEOs, marketing directors and the corporate relations team to produce immediate, measurable results is a big dampener on deep-seated, long-term thought leadership campaigns. The longer-term reputation and trust building resulting from this type of campaign does not satisfy the need for immediate results.
Ask any company which as at its heart a focus on innovation or research and they will tell you that the return on this investment takes years. A culture of thought leadership is no different but the rewards are immeasurable. Ask the multinational management consultancies, they know too well.
4 Responses to “Thought leadership is a culture not a tactic”
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Craig, this bears closer examination. There is a corollary to influence here. Being recognized as a thought leader should have some connection to business performance, as your #3 and #6 suggest. This implies a desire to increase influence — not necessarily for its own sake, but to enhance the prospects for business.
In small enterprises like my own, simple awareness is a challenge; to be successful, people I do not know need to be willing to take a call from me to discuss business. This underpins the entire social media experiment I’ve been conducting for more than a year. The influence debate, which focuses at this point on how to define influence, particularly online, relies to a great extent on thought leadership as a positioning tactic — the opposite of what you suggest here.
When an organization adopts such a tactical focus, I’d argue it isn’t thought leadership it is seeking. It’s publicity. The culture of innovation and leadership should lead to perception of thought leadership — though I may argue that seeking thought leadership may be a path to changing the culture. Hm. Might have to write a post on this subject!
Cheers from steamy Cleveland, Ohio.
S.
Sean, you’re right, if an organisation adopts a tactical focus it is typically seeking publicity. While thought leadership can absolutely be viewed as a positioning tactic, my position is that for thought leadership to truly take hold and to work properly it needs to become part of the culture of that organisation.
Let’s use you as an example of what I mean. In your case you either make thought leadership part of who you are and what you do every day or you occasionally put out a ‘thought leadership’ piece. If you choose the latter, my view is that thought leadership is not part of who you are nor is it part of the culture of your business, rather it is a PR/marketing tactic you use from time to time and it won’t deliver its full potential to you or your business.
As to your question that seeking thought leadership may be a path to changing the culture – I totally agree. Done properly with right amount of senior management buy in it can be a very powerful culture driver. Check out my case study in this blog on SKM – they are a great example of this. I would love to read your post on this subject if you decide to write one.
[...] communication is conversation and PR knows these ropes best; direct marcomms can be enhanced by the thought leadership and narrative powers that are embedded in great PR [...]