With $1.9 billion in revenue and a global presence in more than 100 countries, Gensler is the world’s largest architecture and design firm. It is also a pioneer in that industry in using thought leadership to promote its expertise – and develop new expertise.
As Global Editorial Director, Sam Martin oversees the firm’s key channels: Dialogue magazine, Design Forecast, the Gensler blog, and Gensler’s social media accounts. In this interview with Bob Buday, he dives into why thought leadership has become important to Gensler, and its innovative approaches to research and to publishing and marketing the firm’s expertise.
For architecture firms like Gensler, it’s not enough to showcase beautiful buildings — they must show how great design affects the human experience of being in the space, as Martin points out. Global firms such as Gensler must also be sensitive to regional differences, and not presume that a successful architectural solution in one locale will translate seamlessly to another.
Transcript: Sam Martin and Bob Buday
Bob Buday: Sam, thanks for being on our podcast. I’ve had some experience working with architecture firms, and my impression always was that they marketed themselves by showing pictures of pretty buildings and were a little bit behind the curve thought leadership wise, compared to what the management consulting firms have done over the years. But it seems that what Gensler and other architecture firms are doing, thought leadership wise, is a lot different than what how architecture firms marketed themselves in the past. Would that be a fair statement?
Sam Martin: There’s something to that for sure. Let’s be clear: People love to look at finished buildings and projects and interiors, and we get a lot of traction with those kinds of images on social media. Gensler is different because we’ve realized that it’s not just the geometry and the buildings, it’s also about the experience of being in that space — how people use spaces, how they work in those spaces, what they need to do their best work. For example, what is the experience when you go into a medical building, into a hospital? How can we make the experience of seeing a sports team better? What role does technology play?
We like to say that what Gensler brings to the table are the ideas that exist between the physical world and the human experience of those spaces, and that’s really where our thought leadership exists.
From Journalism to Architecture Thought Leadership
Bob: Let’s start with your career path in this thought leadership profession, and how it led you to Gensler in 2019.
Sam: I got my start as a journalist writing museum reviews and other things for The Austin Chronicle. This was back in the late 90s, and then I took a job as an editor at “This Old House” magazine, which was a Time, Inc. publication. So I moved to New York, and I was there for a few years, in the late 90s, and early 2000s. I wrote for a living, mainly for shelter magazines, but I was always covering sort of architecture and design that was my beat.
I did end up writing a few books and did some ghost writing, and I met the Chief Marketing Officer of Frog Design. Frog was a fairly legendary industrial design and product design firm that was started back in the late 60s, early 70s, by a man named Harmut Esslinger, who ended up working with Steve Jobs and designed one of the first Apple computers. And so I was connected to Hartmut through this person that I met, and because he wanted to write a book. So I spent a year writing a book with Harmut, and it was partly about his life story and partly about his ideas about design. You know that design is not only an esthetic pursuit, but that it is also actually a strategic practice, a way to actually solve difficult business problems.
After I wrote that book with Harmut in 2007, I was invited to become Frog Design’s senior editor in around 2008. Back then we sort of had thought leadership, but nobody really knew what that was. We had a blog, we did a magazine, and we were doing all these things. And I remember the president of the of the company back then, her name was Doreen Lorenzo. She said that ideas are the most important thing that we bring to market. Frog was a design consultancy, so we the more ideas we could get out into the marketplace, the more business we could generate. And that was really my first experience in this world of thought leadership, content marketing and the rest.
After that I bounced around a bit. I went back into publishing. I worked for Texas Monthly magazine here in Austin, which is a very well-regarded magazine that was a little bit behind the times. I helped them sort of transition into the digital world. We did a new website. I convinced a lot of the longtime writers to begin blogging and doing social media, and then I did some more bouncing around. I ran my own content shop for a little while, and that’s where I ran into Gensler. Gensler was actually a client of mine for about a year before I was hired to be the editorial director of the firm. At the end of my engagement with Gensler as a client, my current boss, Leslie Taylor, asked me to write a job description for an editorial director. I realized that it was probably something I could do, and I wrote my own job description. And so here I am.
Thought Leadership at Gensler
Bob: Let’s talk about your responsibilities — content strategy, editorial direction for the publication, design, forecast, the blog, social media, etc.
Sam: Thought leadership at Gensler is something that has been around for a while. When I came here I inherited this enormous amount of content. People were doing a lot of blogging already, but it was super disjointed. They were even blogging on a separate site away from the main gensler.com. And so one of the first things we did was to get it all organized. We brought all of our thought leadership onto the main platform. We introduced a newsletter, Dialog Now. We stood up social media presence across multiple different channels, and then, of course, there’s Design Forecast, which is our annual design publication. So my responsibilities include leading the thought leadership effort at Gensler. And I work with lots of different editors, lots of different regions, and the marketing teams in the regions. We have 10 regions around the world and 57 offices doing work in about 100 countries, so that it’s a quite a broad spectrum. I’m also responsible for things like our case studies and how we tell the stories of our projects, and social media remains a part of what I oversee.
Design Forecast has an increasingly large digital footprint now, and it’s one of the most important thought leadership initiatives we do at the firm. The end result is what everybody sees. But for us, there’s a ton of value in actually getting all of the practice area leaders together. We have 34 different practices in sports, workplace interiors, hospitals, university buildings and more. And we get all these people together, and we work with them to identify different trends that we think our clients should pay attention to. All that research then goes into design forecasts in the form of trends that we then publish every year. We still use print. We are a firm that creates physical artifacts, and so it makes sense that we would have physical artifacts ourselves, and we get a ton of great feedback from our clients because of that.
Beyond that, we publish about we publish over 200 pieces of thought leadership annually on our blog alone. We have about 175 different contributors, so we don’t have a lack of content. Our goal is really to try to figure out how to keep it at a high quality and craft it so that it shows we have a unique point of view.
Payoffs of an Editorial Strategy
Bob: What have been the biggest benefits of having some editorial strategy, structure, and quality improvement for your blogs and other content?
Sam: Bob, you know as well as anyone that good thought leadership has to have a unique point of view. This can mean challenging your clients, since you can’t just tell the same stories over and over again. At one time people were able to just blog whatever they wanted. People still try to submit ideas that are that are not good enough, that may fit better on their own personal LinkedIn channels. But we’ve brought a rigor to that effort; we actually require people to pitch their ideas, and we scrutinize those ideas and work with the person to shape them up. And that whole process happens before anything is even written. So before I arrived there, what that rigor did not exist.
Bob: Was that kind of culture shock?
Sam: It didn’t go down easily. Architects and many people like to think of themselves as really good writers. My editorial team and I have decades of experience, mostly in journalism. We’ve been able to convince the architects that we’re going to help them craft their ideas and articulate them. And you’ve got to trust us, because we’re the experts at words and language and communication. You’re the experts in design and architect. So let’s work together to get that off the ground. There was some pushback: I would send articles back to the architects, and they’d react by saying, “are you telling me that I don’t have good ideas?” I would tell them their ideas were good, but we just need to be more efficient and direct with the language and explain their ideas more simply. In time we convinced people we were doing the right thing.
Bob: I remember 30 years ago, when I worked at a management consulting firm. I was in a role very similar to yours, and the consultants had the same reaction to my edits or if I told them something wasn’t good enough to run. My boss, the director of marketing, had my back and would tell them, “Bob’s word applies here. You can’t go around him.” If they went around my boss, the CEO, Jim Champy, would say, “We defer to the head of marketing and all his people.”
Sam: In any thought leadership program, it helps to have champions at the top. And we absolutely have had champions at the top. You know, we have a co-CEO model at Gensler. When I started, we had Andy Cohen in Los Angeles and Diane Hoskins in Washington, DC. And they were enormous champions of thought leadership. They understood the power of articulating designs and how that can actually drive business.
The way we do business at Gensler is a little bit different from the way a management consulting firm might do business. Most of our business comes from relationships. In the world of commercial real estate, relationships matter a whole bunch; these projects for last years at a time. And so people want to work with folks that they feel comfortable around. And so in my opinion, thought leadership becomes even more important there.
And so yes, it helps to have those champions at the top. Diane in particular, started the Gensler Research Institute many years ago. This is not a part of the editorial function at Gensler, but they are very, very close partners in what we do. And now we’ve got new co-CEOs, and Diane and Andy are still at the firm as global co-chairs. Our new CEOs are Jordan Goldstein and Elizabeth Brink. They, too, really understand the power of good ideas, and they are good writers in their own right. I’ve learned a ton about the practice of editorial and writing from Diane, and now the same is true with Elizabeth.
Measuring Thought Leadership’s Impact
Bob: When you look at the impact of thought leadership on clients, on the growth of the business, and internally as a recruiting tool, how do you measure that at all? Do you talk about that within Gensler about, “Here’s what this thought leadership has been doing for us”?
Sam: We are increasingly talking about that. We are not required to measure. No one is asking us for the ROI of our thought leadership. We, of course, look at metrics and analytics and that sort of thing to get an understanding of which ideas are landing with our clients and which ideas aren’t. We have a very robust SEO strategy so that we have a really good understanding of what people are looking for when they come to us.
Another important thing to understand about Gensler is that there is no business development function that you might have at a management consulting firm. We don’t have BD people sitting here to get leads from us. Our architects are the relationship owners and the relationship builders. Quite frankly, they wouldn’t know what to do with a “lead.”
Nevertheless, it is something that we are increasingly working toward. How can we describe the impact of our thought leadership in terms of business? There are some interesting numbers. We can measure if someone reads a blog or reads our weekly Dialogue Now newsletter. We produce 50 every year, and it goes out to about 70,000 subscribers, and that list grows about 5% a year. That’s a successful product.
We can say that of the people who have read Dialogue Now, those people are associated with certain business and certain opportunities that we’re tracking in Salesforce, to the tune of about $570 million per year. In projected fees, there are over 700 opportunities that aren’t completed, or we don’t really know what’s going on with those opportunities. So that’s about as close as we get to measuring the impact of thought leadership. As you know, it’s very difficult to figure out the ROI of thought leadership, It’s something we’ve been talking about at conferences lately.
How Thought Leadership Seeds the Market
Bob: It sounds like there’s an inherent belief among the leadership of Gensler that thought leadership is a must: “We have to show our ideas. We have to show our expertise, and why it’s different.”
Sam: Increasingly so. A great example is when thought leadership can actually seed the market. Before you get into the market, how do you get your ideas out there so that people are aware of you? If we want to do an airport, for example, in the Bangalore area, how do we even get invited to the RFP or the RFQ for that airport? If there’s a design competition that will result in work, how do we get invited to that competition?
Well, you’ve got to raise awareness. Thought leadership is a great way to do that. Increasingly, thought leadership is that tip of the spear in our go-to-market strategies.
Bob: Do you have architects or heads of practices who field leads that come in, who come to you and say, “Sam, I wrote this blog or I participated in this research project, which you helped to us turn into a series of blogs or whatever. So and so at a firm we’d never have done business with before reached out to me. They said they were intrigued with this, and now we’re in discussions to do some work for them.” Do you hear those kind of things?
Sam: We hear those stories all the time. Those anecdotes do come to us, but there’s no rigor around it. There’s probably so many more of those stories that we don’t hear about.
Two or three years ago, we did a concept for Uber about their flying taxis. We designed a building that could hold travelers, and on top they would have these flying taxis. We brought in the design team, and they did these great sketches that we wrote about: the benefits of flying taxis and how that would change urban infrastructure and mobility and all that stuff. Then we got a call because of that work, and it resulted in [something like] a $7 million deal. So we hear about those sorts of things all the time, too.
As we try to understand the ROI of our thought leadership, we’re telling people to send us these stories. These can be really valuable.
Content Quality Over Quantity
Bob: What have been the key factors in the great progress that you guys have made in the years you’ve been there in thought leadership at Gensler?
Sam: We have put in place a number of things. The first thing we did was to create an editorial calendar, which did not exist at the firm before I arrived. You should never discount a simple tool like that. It’s a spreadsheet. It’s a shared document that anyone in the firm, any of the regional marketing teams, can look at. This calendar has evolved over the years. We now have not only monthly themes, but we have weekly topics as well. And these are anchored to industry events. They’re anchored to the release of our research from the Gensler Research Institute. They’re pegged to certain PR rhythms throughout the year. In November, we know that the press is likely going to be interested in retail. It’s a very traditional idea, and so we’re going to do some retail-based thought leadership.
We also put in place this whole system to field blog pitches. Everyone has access to it. Before that, our in-boxes were filling up with completed blog posts and completed essays and white papers. We had to put a stop to that because of what I said before: We wanted to scrutinize ideas and help shape them.
So we basically have a ticketing system where people are required to fill out a form that comes into our project management software. Then we meet every week to look at the queue and discuss the merits. Then the team goes back to people and either begins the process or says, “Hey, this needs a little bit more development” or “This might be better for your LinkedIn channel.” So those two things have been really, really critical.
Similarly, when it comes to Design Forecast, which is a much bigger singular publication and outcome, we have a similarly rigorous process. At first, we would send out a form and ask people to tell us what they thought the trends were going to be. Now we have extended the timeline. We’ve added three months to the timelines just for research. We still do the form, but then we get those people on the phone, and we ask follow up questions.
There’s a whole other round of identifying trends. Then we write those trends in partnership with them. They give feedback — just like producing an article for a magazine — with a couple of rounds of revision. Eventually it goes into an approval process. It’s a lot more methodical editorial practice.
Bob, I gotta be honest with you: for me, at this point in my career, to talk about the benefits of thought leadership, there’s a lot more trust now in what we’re doing. When young designers and architects join the firm and see our social media reach or our newsletter and the rigor around our storytelling, it gives them a lot of trust that we are actually going to put out really quality stuff. And that is the key: quality over quantity.
That trust that we’ve built, and when I’m able to be on podcasts like yours and talk about the benefits, results in this trickle-down effect where people now want to be a part of what we’re doing. They see the success we’ve had.
Attracting Top Talent
Bob: Do you think Gensler’s thought leadership has become a recruiting tool, both at the university level and the more experienced architect level?
Sam: Absolutely, I really, really do. One of the challenges we’ve had is our website. The first impression people have of our website is that, “Oh, Gensler is this big, giant corporation.” But once you get one step below the surface, you realize all of the really great creative ideas that are happening there. We have a creative culture that we try to pull out into our thought leadership, and we try to project that through our stories. For some practices that is critical.
In retail, or in sports, or in hospitality/hotels, clients don’t want the same hotel, the same sports stadium – they want some uniqueness to it. And so we’ve got to project that uniqueness and that innovation and that creativity through our thought leadership.
I think people who want to work for us see these unique ideas and then tell themselves that they want to be a part of that. I also think architects, in particular, love to express themselves. And when they see this culture of thought leadership, they can see that it’s not just going to be about designing buildings. It’s going to be about talking about ideas.
The Gensler Research Institute
Bob: Okay, tell us a little bit about the Gensler Research Institute. From where I sit, it looks like a tremendous asset, for the company overall but especially for what you folks do in publishing good ideas, and using social media to promote those ideas.
Sam: The Research Institute is incredibly important, and it is an incredible function for the firm in general. It’s been around for, I want to say, about 20 years, and it started out as researching workplace effectiveness. How do people get their best work done? Our first workplace survey was done in 2005 so we’re having another one come out in a few weeks, and so this will be our 20-year anniversary.
The Research Institute is a wholly contained group of data scientists and researchers who do surveys in the field and then publish the findings and the insights on a variety of topics. Our main [intellectual property] comes out of the workplace research practice. Thia research has resulted in our City Pulse surveys and eventually a City Index.
We’ve got some healthcare research, sports research and others. We also have this really cool grant program in which anyone in the firm is able to actually submit an idea to the Research Institute, and that institute will fund that idea in terms of the hours donated right to this research. It’s an incredible grassroots program, and it results in some very interesting, cool ideas. It’s a way for the architects to express ideas or explore ideas that they wouldn’t normally be able to in their client work.
Bob: I think it’s fascinating. What it helps do is to bridge this gap between thought leadership research and practice. Does it ever turn out that a research study undertaken in the institute actually leads to a new practice for the firm, or changes to your practices?
Sam: It has definitely led to new projects. Even more than that, it also leads to interesting thought leadership, like a project that won a grant last year. Mexico City is going through an incredible drought right now, which is ironic, because it’s built on a lake. But they just don’t have enough water, and they’re already talking about what to do when the water runs out, and it’s a real serious issue. And so a team in our Mexico City office came up with this idea to create a series of rainwater catchment systems all around the city, in these community plazas. They would double not only as like a water catchment system, but also as a community center. It’s a real simple idea, and an approach to solving the problem. It actually turned into a conversation with the government and the city of Mexico City, and further investment from the firm, because it was such a good idea. It’s getting a lot of traction.
Bob: Most of the people doing the research are architects and designers at Gensler, right?
Sam: Yes, but not always. Architecture professors and design professors are looped into these studies. Study proposals are submitted by anyone in the firm. I’ve thought about submitting a proposal for a research grant to study the impact of thought leadership, but most of the grant proposals are a very grassroots thing,
Then the Research Institute selects the studies that they do. Once the studies have been completed, then we have an internal awards program where we invite outside professors, peers from the design community, other architects, authors, journalists, to sit on a panel and choose winners out of several different categories. And this is a really great way for us to get an understanding of how our ideas are are being received externally. And we make a big deal out of it. They’re called the Gensler Research Institute Awards.
It happens once a year. The whole firm sits and watches the jury talk about their deliberations and talk about the winners and why they chose them. It’s an internal program that people love.
We love the Gensler Research Institute too. How lucky are we to actually have research and data and insights that we can say, “Hey, we’ve done this research.” We don’t have to ask permission. This is our research. And so then we ask ourselves, “What does that mean?” The data from the Research Institute is a jumping off point for really good thought leadership. If we know this about how people think about the office, then we should be designing in these ways, right?
How Research Underpins Thought Leadership
Bob: How difficult would your job be if there was no Gensler Research Institute?
Sam: I think we’d be using insights from McKinsey and other management consulting firm, as most architecture firms have done. The Gensler Research Institute just lends a certain amount of credibility to our ideas and our thought leadership that I think would be really hard to duplicate otherwise. Having our own pool of data is an incredible source for us to dip into.
Bob: I tell people there’s two sources of content for thought leadership. One is the field experience of the people in your firm who are billable, whether they’re architects or consultants or accountants. The other is primary research – i.e., studies, quantitative and qualitative research with clients and prospects and others. You need both. You need to collect the field experience of your people out there who are delivering the services of the firm, but you also need to research clients and non-clients, and kind of take their pulse and identify what they need and the best practices. The work of thought leadership people becomes much easier if you have both sources of content working for you, not just one.
Sam: We talk about this all the time. The data that comes out of the research institute is interesting, but on its own doesn’t do the work that it can when put into a thought, a piece of thought leadership, right? For example, I may understand that 40% of the people who go into the office actually want to be there because they need to do focus work and want a quiet space, and 40% of the people also need collaborative space. A very small percentage of people actually want to be at the office to socialize. We can put all this on a pie chart and think about it.
But once my team works with the Research Institute, we can then understand what all this means. How should we be thinking about the workplace now? This can actually result in a really unique point of view and some really interesting design solutions. Big ideas are really interesting. Big ideas for the future are really interesting. But we’ve found that our clients really respond when we talk about this big idea then show a different point of view of the office.
Future Directions and Challenges
Bob: Where do you see Gensler thought leadership going over the rest of this decade? I know it’s hard to project five years out, but what, what activities do you think will remain the same and what might change? You know, I think Gensler is,
Sam: Gensler is already a global firm, but we tend to focus on the US as a default, and I think that needs to change and will change. I think our global markets are increasing. I think our challenge with thought leadership is to be able to offer ideas that are relevant to very specific locales. I’ll go back to my example about Bangalore. How do you build an airport in Bangalore? Or what are the ideas that you need to know in order to build an airport in Bangalore? That’s a much different prospect than an airport in Los Angeles, right? I think the same could be true for a sports stadium in Cairo. So I think where our thought leadership is going is that not only do we need go-to-market strategies led by thought leadership around specific practice areas, but they also have to be in specific regions. And so I think our thought leadership is going to get much more localized, much more specific to the needs of the people in cities and regions around the world. There are some big ideas about architecture and the human experience of space, and now we need to get much more specific in those ideas. And I think that’s where we’re headed over the next 10 years.
The great thing about Gensler is that we are sort of a flat organization. Sometimes the larger offices –like London, New York, Los Angeles — have their own marketing teams that help the architects respond to RFPs and prepare client presentations. They know their market really well. I think we also need a strong senior editorial presence in each of those markets, people who can really understand those markets and the types of thought leadership and content it takes to succeed in those regions. I think that’s the number one thing that needs to happen. I ask myself all the time if generative AI has a role to play here, and I think it could. But as you know, AI is still not great.
The Drawbacks of AI
Sam: I do think AI getting better, but there’s two things that I think are wrong with it today. One is that our people are the biggest asset in a relationship-driven firm like Gensler. AI can’t go into a room and talk to clients and potential clients. Our ideas, from our own people, get us into the room, and so our people have to be able to articulate those ideas when they’re shaking hands with people. The second issue with AI is that we are already inundated with content. AI may be able to give you all the content you want, but that’s not what we need. We need quality content…less volume and more quality content. And so those two things right now seem to be at odds with what generative AI can do, but we are exploring that possibility and seeing if it if it could help. Maybe it could at least help us stand up some programs in these very specific regions around the world.
Bob: Well, Sam, this has been great. If I was 25 years old, I think I would be applying to go work for you. I just totally admire what you what you and your colleagues have done with thought leadership. I think every consulting firm, IT services firm and every technology, software company and accounting firm should be looking at what you guys have done in thought leadership.
Sam: Thank you, Bob, it’s always good to see you.