Comprehensive thought leadership consulting for B2B & professional services firms
What’s changed the most: widespread use, competition for mind share, and the ascendance of R&D and new distribution channels. This June I celebrated my 30th year in thought leadership marketing. I didn’t know that was the name of this field I had entered back in 1987, when I left the world of business journalism to run …
Looking Back (and Ahead) on 30 Years in Thought Leadership Marketing Read More »
Quality standards will keep rising because more companies badly want to be viewed as thought leaders in their domains. That means on just about any topic, you’ll have many more competitors writing about it than you have today. In this post, I predict the biggest changes I see for the rest of this decade. My focus here …
Authors of many bestselling business books, Harvard Business Review articles and research reports don’t actually write the words. The ideas are theirs, but they leave it to expert communicators to express it compellingly. After 26 years of watching consultants and other advisers successfully use ghostwriters, I was stunned recently to hear a professional services marketer …
How Fear of Ghosts Can Keep Your Thought Leaders in the Dark Read More »
B2B companies that conduct primary research have a growing number of online options today in collecting best practice and other primary research data. In a previous post, I laid out four stages that professional services and other B2B firms go through in becoming thought leaders (Stone Age, Medieval, Industrial and Post-Industrial). Each stage reflects varying …
Part 3: Leapfrogging on the Thought Leadership Evolutionary Chart Read More »
If your firm is less advanced, perhaps the stages will provide insights on why you’re not getting the value you expected from your thought leadership investments. From 23 years of helping companies become recognized as experts in their domains, I have found their ability to do so has varied greatly. And it wasn’t because of …
Part 2: Where is Your Firm on the Thought Leadership Evolutionary Chart? Read More »
Thought leadership can be seen as an evolutionary timeline with five phases. Here’s how to move up the scale so you can generate revenue through thought leadership. B2B companies vary tremendously in the ability to gain recognition for their expertise. Many firms with deeper and more differentiated expertise are not nearly as well known as certain …
Part 1: Moving Your Firm up the Thought Leadership Evolutionary Chart Read More »