Like wine connoisseurs who understand how soil and climate can help create a great wine, thought leadership connoisseurs know how compelling content gets made.
By Bob Buday
Running a thought leadership group is starting to become a prestigious job. It’s also a precarious one, given the average investment B2B companies make (from our 2022 research, 5.9% of revenue) and the other big risk of doing it poorly: losing market recognition to competitors that do it better.
I’ve seen this bring unease in people who run thought leadership groups. While their role’s legitimacy has rapidly increased, the job is still not nearly as well accepted as a chief sales or marketing officer’s. If we polled CEOs of B2B firms on the need for a head of thought leadership, I predict most would say something to the effect of: “Head of thought leadership — what do they do?”
This lack of full legitimacy results in budget freezes or severe cuts during economic downturns. That’s especially disheartening when it leads to postponing a promising new study, shelving a groundbreaking book in progress or cancelling a long-running event series. It hurts deeply when a thought leadership chief is forced to lay off talented staffers.
And for the thought leadership chief, having to fight hard to get respect also means remaining a level or two below the core leadership team on the org chart. Top managers don’t see the thought leadership chief as a player who can drive revenue.
Since they’re not happy about their place on the corporate totem pole, some thought leadership chiefs have asked me what they can do about it. My immediate instinct has been to listen, play back what I heard, and sympathize. But my most helpful response is to go beyond what they say and read samples of their core product: the content their team produces. Sometimes, when thought leadership heads tell me they don’t get enough respect, I understand why when I read their content.
In short, it isn’t consistently good enough. No article or study report is excellent, and too few are very good. Some are, but more are so-so.
The ultimate product of a thought leadership group is the content their people create. Like a poorly designed new automobile or streaming series with a dull storyline, no amount of marketing can paper over an uninspiring product. The same applies to content that firms pose as “thought leadership.”
Lackluster content is a hard problem to solve quickly. But thought leadership chiefs must solve it if they want to elevate their role and get a seat at the leadership table that the role deserves. That role has two parts, both central to revenue growth for a firm. The first is supplying content the CMO needs to develop compelling marketing messages. The second is supplying content to fuel service innovation.
The Enduring Elements of Compelling Content
Not enough thought leadership professionals deeply understand what constitutes compelling content. Even fewer recognize the two of the most important elements: a novel solution and case study evidence that it generated big improvements. (Our 2022 survey of executives who use thought leadership to help make major purchasing decisions rated such case studies as No. 1.)
This comes at a big cost to companies and careers. These thought leadership professionals hire and promote the wrong people because they don’t understand the skills required to gather case study evidence and create novel solutions. They develop mediocre content because they minimize the value of deep case studies. And they market it ineffectively because they focus on stats and lack compelling case examples. Statistics-laden presentations bore viewers thirsting for real examples.
I refer to thought leadership professionals who intimately understand the attributes of quality content as “content connoisseurs.” Similar to wine connoisseurs, they have a refined ability to recognize quality content. For wine experts, it’s attributes such as acidity, tannin, alcohol, sweetness, and body. For thought leadership experts, the elements of great content include novelty, evidence, depth, practicality, relevance, clarity, and rigor.
Like wine connoisseurs who know the conditions from which great wine emanates (region of world, climate, soil, etc.), thought leadership connoisseurs know how great content is made – especially the role of primary case study interviews that compare best and worst practices.
The Advantages That Content Connoisseurs Gain
When you are a content connoisseur, the people around you are far more likely to produce exceptional content. In addition, you will be better able to identify and recruit people who can do that. What’s more, you’ll have an inside edge on the content you need when you market it through public forums, books, op-eds, and even social media messaging. Most important, you and your firm will be able to enjoy the fruits of that content: market interest in your firm’s offerings that rises from tepid to heated.
What is it About Content That Captures Executive Attention?
Godfather movie series director Francis Ford Coppola once said, “The essence of a great screenplay is an extraordinary premise. If you come up with a premise that is unique and original, you’re halfway there.” Or as another legendary movie director, Steven Spielberg, put it, “Audiences are harder to please if you’re just giving them special effects. … but they’re easy to please if it’s a good story.”
Those who have read my articles over the years or my book in the last two years know my hallmarks of thought-leading content. When you deeply understand those elements – when you are a content connoisseur – great things can happen to you. Let’s start with the talent around you.
The Talent Edge
The first advantage you gain is in knowing the most important skills for creating exceptional content. Those are skills in two areas: a) conducting illuminating case study interviews, and b) recognizing the patterns or common themes found in best practices, and how they differ from the behaviors and actions of companies that constitute worst practices.
With that knowledge, you are better at recognizing the talent you need in hiring. For case study interviewing, the skills include getting people to quickly trust you, open up and tell their stories, and listening intently for something you didn’t realize before. That latter skill is a much different one held by people who want to collect stories and facts that fit their predetermined view on a topic.
Then you’ll better recognize the skill required to identify patterns in case research – to connect the dots, so to say. These people are the ones you are counting on to turn analysis into groundbreaking insights on a better way to solve a big problem. You’ll need people who are comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity at the outset of a research project. But you’ll eventually need them to be able to turn the chaos of a pile of research data into a coherent understanding of what separates the best companies from the rest.
Storytelling is the next skill that is important here – narrative or argument development, as I refer to it. With the big insights developed, you’ll need researchers and writers who can lay down an elegant article about their research findings. A six-part narrative structure that I have practiced for 36 years, written about for more than 20 years, and taught for the last three years has been extremely helpful – for me and my clients, and for people I teach it to.
The Research Edge
The skills I previously mentioned are fundamental to designing research and conducting groundbreaking thought leadership research. They enable you to design studies that make case study interviews as important a research stream as quantitative surveys, where respondents answer largely close-ended questions.
Case study research is more important. I once asked Michael Hammer, the late guru of business reengineering (the blockbuster management consulting service of the 1990s), why his research team gathered only case studies, not quantitative data through executive surveys. He told me something I have never forgotten: “I don’t care what executives think,” he said, meaning he didn’t care about their answers to questions in a survey. (For example, “How important is customer data to customer centricity?”) He quickly followed, “I want to know what their companies are doing.”
I recently asked Brad Power, a consultant and researcher who worked closely with Hammer at that time, what the research charter was. Power said it was “threading the needle between something that is 1) provocative, distinctive and guaranteed new, and 2) something that is proven.” The more stories of companies or people that “did the thing that you are recommending,” the better, said Power. Those stories give “those who follow … a recipe or formula, and the assurance of the same benefits.” When presenting the reengineering concept to the members of the research service co-owned by Hammer and the company where I worked, Hammer didn’t start with the concept. He started with the stories – case examples his research team gathered from the members.
Other blockbuster management concepts – the thought leadership equivalent of a hit record on the charts for weeks – were conceived with a similar formula. The originator of the theory of disruptive innovation, the late Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, told an interviewer in 2011: “We’ve learned so much from interacting with companies which have tried to use our work, and we continue to learn from each company with which we interact. … Moreover, we’ve learned from case studies of success as well as from case studies of failure. And we actually learn the most when we are wrong. It is only by studying anomalies that we really can build a more robust collection of theories.”
The case study method has been central to famed management thinker Jim Collins (co-author of “Built to Last” and author of “Good to Great”). He calls his research approach the “comparison method.” He and his research team choose a set of companies from which to compare over a long period of time, and then to compare the successful companies against the unsuccessful companies to understand the key differences. “Our comparative historical method helps us see more clearly the factors correlated with the rise and fall of great companies.”
The Marketing and Sales Edge
The third edge that content connoisseurs gain is in marketing and getting into conversations about their research. They fill their content with best-practice case examples. Readers don’t want to be spoon fed generic answers. They want to come up with the answer themselves. Case examples do that. As Christensen wrote in a 2010 Harvard Business Review article, stories that impart lessons resonate. Just reciting lessons does not.
In the article, he remembered getting a call from Andy Grove, then-chairman of semiconductor giant Intel. Grove asked Christensen to fly out to Intel for a conversation. But when he arrived, Grove told him he only had 10 minutes. He asked Christensen to explain what his disruptive innovation model meant for the chipmaker. The professor pushed back, telling Grove he would use those 10 minutes to tell the story of a steel company, Nucor.
Wrote Christensen in his HBR article: “If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think – and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.”
Thought leadership professionals who are content connoisseurs gain a distinct marketing edge in securing “earned” content – i.e., getting their articles accepted in prestigious publications, their public speaking pitches approved by leading conference organizers, and getting access to other places with high barriers to reach influential audiences.
Why You Must Be a Content Connoisseur Today
There’s lots of hype about thought leadership now, and across many B2B sectors. Much of it is deserved; companies that excel at thought leadership grow faster because the marketplace sees their expertise as superior.
However, leadership at companies that don’t excel at thought leadership are likely to lose patience with it. They may decide it works for another sector, or a competitor in their sector, but that it’s not necessary for them.
From 37 years in the thought leadership profession, I’ve come to believe that only those thought leadership chiefs who deeply understand the core elements of compelling content, look for specific skills to produce it, and showcase those content elements in marketing and sales campaigns will be the ones who reach the pinnacle of this profession.
To these content connoisseurs come the spoils of thought leadership.