I recently opened my inbox and found an email from a reporter I worked with early in my career.
My former colleague had just read my blog post and she had one burning question for me:
“So WHAT IS thought leadership? It’s an inside baseball term. Can you define it?”
Good question
But it’s also one that we marketers also need to ask ourselves. Even among marketers there seems to be some confusion about what thought leadership is. I often hear people use thought leadership as a synonym for content marketing – another big buzzword du jour.
But they are not one and the same thing. Not at all.
Thought leadership, to summarize Forrester Research analyst Jeff Ernst, is the strategic process of coming up with and sharing big ideas, insights and new perspectives on the critical issues that buyers face.
On the other hand, content marketing is the tactical process of producing communications (i.e., content) for your prospects, customers and other key target audiences.
Blurring the lines
Much of that content marketing typically focuses on building awareness for your company and selling its solutions.
That’s the stuff many marketers spend the bulk of their days creating: product brochures, web content, sales presentations, email campaigns and the like.
Most business people would never confuse this type of content as thought leadership.
But there are plenty of executives and even some marketers who think of white papers, eBooks, articles and blog posts as thought leadership content.
But it isn’t necessarily so.
That white paper or eBook may do a nice job of summing up current industry trends, thinking and approaches, but it may be little more than a thinly disguised product pitch.
In my view, it’s not true thought leadership unless it does one or more of these 6 things:
• Challenges current assumptions about a business challenge or approach
• Presents new insights, perspectives or ideas
• Offers innovative solutions to an existing problem(s)
• Pinpoints areas of opportunity, process improvement or profitability for prospects and customers
• Provides real leadership that inspires people to believe, contribute, collaborate and take action to address a problem
• Anticipates future trends and challenges
The future of thought leadership
True thought leadership will never go out of style. The world will always be hungry for fresh thinking and leadership.
However, to be effective, thought leadership must build credibility and attract followers. Most importantly, it must offer a vision for change and must lead on the issues that matter most to buyers.
How do you define thought leadership? What would you add to the list of requirements for true thought leadership? What do you see as the critical differences between content marketing and thought leadership?
Sheryl can be reached at sherylaroehl@gmail.com.
According to me Thought Leadership is a way of demonstrating a subject matter expertise by way of knowledge and insights. It is a way of communication where the thought leader shares his ideas and solutions and initiates debate & discussions, so that solutions can be reached at in a collaborative manner.
You have aptly covered the traits of a thought leadership. I would add to it – the ability to think of future challenges, one that are not known today.
Rasika
MindCrunch
Thanks, Rasika, for your comment. You make a very good point — the thought leader must anticipate future challenges, trends and business issues — and ideally, recommend solutions to mitigate or solve those problems. I do think that thought leaders are inherently subject matter experts and skilled, knowledgeable and experienced in a particular field or discipline. However, thought leaders go beyond SME by providing vision, insight and strategic guidance.
Wonderful summary of the key differences between thought leadership and content marketing, Sheryl. Thank you for writing one of the few articles that talks about thought leadership in a way consistent with its original promise. As you say, at its core, the issue is one of tactics being mixed up with strategy.
May I add one further thought? This might help also clarify the difference between thought leadership and expertise (because if thought leaders were simply “experts,” why do we need a separate term for them)?
I believe that one of the greatest services true leaders offer is to help others get to where they are. Experts — and I speak as someone with many years’ experience in academia where this attitude is rife — like to set themselves apart; they want to bamboozle with their complicated jargon and imply that without them you wouldn’t be able to solve your problems.
Leaders–and here I’m focusing in on those rare individuals who are true thought leaders–are motivated to share what they know in order to provoke and/or inspire others to greater insights and help them find their own solutions. For an idea to be “thought leading” it should identify a pathway that others would not have seen or even imagine existed on their own. Maybe not just for problem-solving but to envision a different way of viewing and acting on the world.
As George Bernard Shaw once said, “Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking two or three times a week.” As many other luminaries have pointed out, real thinking isn’t as common as we all believe it to be. That’s the contribution thought leaders make…they open up a sense of possibility for others to act on.
I would very much like to send you a complimentary copy of my book #Thought Leadership Tweet: 140 Prompts for Designing and Executing an Effective Thought Leadership Campaign which stresses the need for thought leadership to be seen as a strategic focus that is part and parcel of the culture of an organization. Please email me if you’d like to receive this.
Thank you, Liz, for your comments. I love what you have to say about the responsibility of thought leaders to reach back and help others get to where they are. So it is not just a self-serving or lofty kind of thought leadership that you speak of, rather it is also grounded in inspiring and helping others to find their own path and their own solutions — a kind of servant leadership, if you will. (BTW: I have always loved that wonderful quote from GBS.) Thanks again for your thoughtful perspective on thought leadership. I really look forward to reading your book.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as recycled content and white papers land in my inbox. My expectations of something new or interesting are lowered each time.
Hi Sheryl…I appreciate your post, although I would disagree that content marketing is tactical. Content marketing is a very strategic process in the organization. Of the types of content marketing that can be employed, thought leadership is a content marketing tactic. I would reverse the way you have it.
Either way, both are important for all sizes of businesses today. Many organizations look at content marketing as being tactical, which is why so many organizations are struggling with it (they create content without a clear strategy).
Thanks
Joe
Thanks, Joe, for your comments. I agree with you that content is a key part of the marketing function. I say that as someone who has spent most of her career in various content marketing roles. My intention was not to diminish content marketing. I greatly admire and support the important work that you are doing through Content Marketing Institute to evangelize content marketing. When it comes to thought leadership, companies must first start by building the strategy and “formulating big ideas and insightful points of view” on the issues that their buyers face. Then, marketers have the job of capturing, packaging, executing and delivering those ideas to buyers and other target audiences via multiple content vehicles. I’m a big believer in both thought leadership and content marketing because they go hand in hand and together they have the power to transform marketing.
Hi Sheryl,
Thanks for starting this discussion. I like what you said in your 6 points above! I also see that Joe and Liz have already chimed in with great points, but I wanted to add another, similar to what Liz mentioned about ‘leaders.’ If you look back at some of the thought leadership literature, specifically the stuff that the folks at Rain Today put together some years back, one of the criteria for being a thought leader was to be “driven to teach others what they know, with no strings attached.” Now, I think that can also be done with content marketing (you don’t need to be a thought leader to leverage content, but the vehicle for thought leadership is often content), but thought leaders also have a very distinct point of view (as posited by the Bloom Group’s research), and voice in the market. They also have a mindset that affords them the latitude to take their ideas to market, often with the intent of ‘agitating’ (stirring, not aggravating) the market in their direction.
Finally, and a biggie in thought leadership that I didn’t see in the 6 points above, is that thought leadership is earned or attained, never claimed. Saying one is a though thought leader doesn’t make it so. In fact, and I think most of us have seen cases of this, it often makes them less a thought leader is they use any of their content or ‘airtime’ to talk about how much of a thought leader they are. Thought leadership, to play on the name, is about letting the thoughts, ideas, memes and concepts take hold and speak for themselves, while hopefully bringing along the person who spoke those thoughts along for the ride.
This is a great time to be in the thought leadership and content marketing space. When you have so much “convergence” – thought leadership concepts, content marketing strategy, inbound marketing philosophy, the Challenger Sales approach (and extensive research to go with it), and social media channels – you can’t help but see the change taking place in organizations around the world.