Thought leadership isn’t a monopoly any more
By Wayde Bull, Planning Director at Principals.
For business-to-business marketers, the concept of thought leadership is a very familiar one. In knowledge intensive industries like law and audit, technology and engineering, brands commonly seek to convey themselves as leaders by publishing thought-provoking papers around new management concepts and visions of the future.
Thought leadership in marketing borrows heavily from the academic publishing model; it’s all about harnessing a company’s best thinking, to offer fresh insight and advice to prospective customers. Ideas compelling enough, it is hoped, to lead to a customer enquiry or a request to meet.
Arguably the most successful practitioner of b2b thought leadership in recent years is IBM, who has published a relentless stream of thinking about the potential of IT to transform business and society, packaged around catchy themes like e-business, the on-demand enterprise and Smarter Planet. This deeply resourced commitment to thought leadership publishing has been instrumental in transforming the reputation of IBM from a big box hardware maker into an agile services and ideas company. GE’s more recent efforts to reposition itself as a business driven by Eco-Imagination emulates the IBM formula.
But there’s a new form of thought leadership that progressive brands are starting to champion, enabled by the internet, whereby the search for fresh ideas extends beyond the company firewall, to involve external experts and even customers themselves. Here the conventional thought leadership logic is turned on its head. Rather than suggesting one’s own organisation has all the answers, a first wave of brands are opening themselves up to the possibilities of co-creation, where the brand becomes a clearing house for new ideas, drawn from literally all over the place.
Once more, the old, one way, message-out model of customer communications is giving way to something more free-form, dynamic and exciting.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ recent campaign “What would you like to change?” was designed to engage thinking Australians in a two-way conversation about big societal issues, cleverly dovetailed with PWC’s philosophies about making change stick. Rather than the usual dry sell of a firm’s change management capabilities, PWC wrapped their message in emotionally engaging content, serving to demonstrate the deeper societal value of their work.
Audi have recently created an Urban Futures Award, inviting six eminent architecture practices to imagine the future of the car in the megacities of 2030. This is a clever brand building exercise on several levels. It enables Audi, a style and design driven brand, to associate itself with the design elite. It creates a stream of thought-provoking ideas and visual content that will be used to engage customers and civic leaders worldwide. And it enables the business to visualise a future in which its own brand is absolutely integral.
The Carbon War Room is another masterful exercise in personal branding from Richard Branson. It’s an ideas trust seeking to mobilise entrepreneurs and help them to implement market driven solutions to climate change. It’s a powerful example of crowdsourcing that will hopefully connect enterprising people to the seed capital, scientists, engineers and business leaders who can help to make them happen.
Examples of this new thought leadership approach are spilling over into the consumer brands space. The Pepsi Refresh project is a compelling example of tapping the wisdom of the crowd online, by inviting consumers to nominate community groups worthy of grants from US$5,000-250,000. Pepsi have committed to funding those projects deemed the most worthy by the crowd, not themselves. Serving to demonstrate that the smartest brands don’t claim a monopoly on the best ideas any more.
First published on AFR (www.afr.com) - 8th April 2010
