Thought leadership interview on RainToday.com

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This appeared on the RainToday.com site and is an interview with me on my favourite topic – thought leadership.  You can click here to listen  and this is what they had to say as an intro:

Effective thought leadership—the kind that attracts prospects that eventually become clients—requires a strong platform that your entire company adopts, not “random acts of content,” says Craig Badings, author of Brand Stand: Seven Steps to Thought Leadership.

It’s about delivering new ideas and content to your target audience based on insight into the issues and challenges they face, he says. It’s also about differentiating you from competitors, establishing you as the go-to expert, and positioning you as a trusted advisor. And to make that happen, firms must have an organized and concerted effort that involves everyone in the organization.

“To truly take hold, [thought leadership] has to become part of the culture of the organization. In fact, I’d be as bold as to say that companies that have a sales culture should really be trying very hard to replace it with a thought leadership culture because in my view the sales pitches we know are really dead. It’s no longer good enough for companies to flog their products or services,” Badings says. “If thought leadership is not a part of corporate culture, then that thought leadership campaign is going to limp along and will never really achieve any great height.”

Listen as Badings, who also blogs at Thought Leadership, discusses:

• The four things that make a successful thought leadership campaign
• Firms that are excelling with their thought leadership campaigns
• How sales teams can incorporate a firm’s thought leadership platform to win more deals
• His methodology—START IP—for developing and implementing a thought leadership platform

2 Responses to “Thought leadership interview on RainToday.com”

1. tom manning says:

   September 18, 2010 at 02:43

   Does the fact that The Economist magazine last week wrote that thought leadership is an “annoying” phrase mean that this concept is already in decline?
2. craig says:

   September 21, 2010 at 08:49

   Tom, as per my answer to this question in another part of this blog, I have purposely stayed away from commenting on the Economist piece for a few days so I wouldn’t say what first came to my mind when reading this article.

   Fortunately this is the great thing about non-evidence based articles – they are merely opinions and we are all free to share those. This is merely another opinion from a commentator who has been ‘annoyed’ somewhere down the track by some thought leadership material or the loose use of the term. But then on the latter aren’t we all?

   If it was the Economist’s stance one would have to start thinking about words like hypocritical. Afer all what is the purpose of The Economist Debates, The Economist Intelligence Unit and The Economist Conferences? Absolutely, The Economists’ very own thought leadership platforms.

   Maybe the commentator who penned this article should ask the Economist’s customers whether this thought leadership is ‘annoying’ them.