Thought Leadership: Are You Making It or Faking It?
By Fiona Czerniawska
Thought leadership has always been a no-brainer for consulting
firms.
Marketing brochures are greeted with howls of derision
from cynical clients. Brands are horrendously expensive
to build. Looking to raise awareness? Why not knock out
a couple of thousand words on your latest assignment, call
it a white paper, and send it your clients?
The problem is that this no-brainer has become precisely
that: something with (almost) no brain in it. And that’s
not good enough any more. The market is too crowded; some
firms position themselves as “owning” certain
markets; they’re also investing in better research
and writing.
A Crowded Market
If you look at the websites of the world’s top forty
consulting firms (in terms of revenue), there are almost
3,500 articles and reports positioned as thought leadership—and
that’s leaving out the tens of thousands of case studies
and descriptions of services that don’t justify the
label.
Around a third of the bona fide material addresses strategy-related
issues—studies of new or emerging markets, planning
tools, and so on—and another third focuses on more
operational topics such as business process efficiency,
technology, procurement, and outsourcing. The remaining
third is made up from a whole host of topics, from leadership
to cost control.
The first thing to strike you about this is how thought
leadership “pools”. Most material focuses on
the same small number of topics, rather than picking up
new and emerging ones—in other words, it flows down
towards the common areas rather than strikes off by itself.
Take business processes as an example. This is one of the
most crowded areas of the market, accounting for more than
500 documents just by itself, yet firms continue to churn
out articles on it as if they’re the only ones to
have any to say on this subject. Thus we have Roland Berger
writing “Innovation and Corporate Value,” Marakon
on “From Breakthrough to Value: Mastering the Art
of Profitable Discovery,” AT Kearney talking about
“The Path to Maximizing Margins,” and the Boston
Consulting Group on “Making Innovation Pay”—to
name but a few.
Even new topics can become crowded very quickly: five years
ago, thought leadership on financial management and regulation
was thin on the ground, but the amount of material on operational
risk has doubled in the last year; that on financial management
has gone up six-fold.
Accenture and McKinsey are the most prolific firms on the
thought leadership scale, significantly ahead of their nearest
rivals: IBM, PA Consulting and PricewaterhouseCoopers. But
watch this space: offshore firms, notably Infosys and Wipro.
Staking a Claim
Something else that would have been true five years ago
is that consulting firms had a scattergun approach to thought
leadership, firing off articles in all directions apparently
without much of a plan. Most material was generic: designed
to apply equally to every sector.
Today, one of the ways consulting firms are trying to put
space between themselves and their competitors is by tailoring
their thinking towards the needs of specific sectors. McKinsey
is the master of this: using different perspectives from
the same research base to generate sector-specific messages.
But other firms have found that focusing on highly specialized
areas plays to their strengths and experience.
Thus Unisys, not perhaps the first name to spring to mind
when you think about thought leadership in the consulting
industry, has used its extensive work in the insurance sector
as the basis for a small number of articles on technical
issues only of interest to insurance companies—precision
targeting no less.
Ernst & Young is re-entering the consulting industry
having sold its consulting practice to Capgemini in 2000,
so its thought leadership output is still limited in comparison
to many other firms. But what it does have is more focused:
more than half concentrates on corporate governance issues,
making it the clear leader in this space, at least in terms
of volume.
Quality Control
Quantity is something—how often you get your message
out does affect the probability clients will hear it—but
it is not everything. Many leading firms have recruited
professional writers and journalists to ensure their thinking
is readable; some put serious money into carrying out in-depth
research.
Clients look for three things from thought leadership.
They want something relevant to challenges they face, something
new and different, and something that is supported by hard
evidence. A single case study or recycling second-hand ideas
is not enough.
Bain is not only astute in the way it gets its thinking
into newspapers and other media, but also has a knack of
picking topical issues and making them appealing. Booz Allen
doesn’t produce nearly as much material as its immediate
rivals, but what it does generate is more distinctive, opinionated
and interesting. In an environment where a single client
case study is widely regarded as sufficient evidence that
an idea or approach works, IBM and McKinsey lead the way
in terms of the depth of their research.
And there’s one thing clients don’t want: too
hard a sell. Thought leadership is a fine balance between
meeting clients’ desire for something relevant, interesting,
and well-supported and meeting consulting firms’ need
to make money.
In this context, a call-to-action—perhaps some benchmarking
data for clients to compare themselves to or a tool for
evaluating their performance—is more likely to result
in consulting work in the long-term because it doesn’t
try to sell too unsubtly in the short-term. Accenture is
particularly astute in how it commercializes its thought
leadership.
Lessons Learned
To be successful thought leadership needs to be thought
through.
In a crowded market, firms need to see who’s saying
what before they start publishing material. While you may,
indeed, have something new to say, you’re going to
find it harder to get your point across if clients have
already heard an awful lot from your competitors. Look for
the topics or angles others haven’t spotted—the
white space.
Make sure your thought leadership appears relevant to clients.
Don’t hold forth about business in general when you
can show off your specialist expertise by tailoring what
you’re saying to the needs of a specific sector. Applying
thought leadership to a particular industry reduces the
level of immediate competition, shows you can apply your
thinking, and is more likely to be perceived as relevant
by your potential audience.
Finally, think about quality. Pick subjects which are in
the news and use the title and first paragraph to introduce
them in an unusual, even offbeat way. Make sure there’s
something to attract people’s attention. Be prepared
to have strong opinions: much material by consulting firms
is bland because consultants don’t want to offend
anyone. Don’t skimp on the research: clients would
rather read one article which is supported by hard evidence
than a hundred bits of visionary thinking. And find a subtle
way to encourage a client to do something, but don’t
expect to sell something.
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Fiona Czerniawska is the author of White
Space 2007, a unique research report that
evaluates the latest thought leadership published by the
top global consulting firms. For more information, go to
www.arkimeda.com.
Read our past interviews with Fiona Czerniawska:
Fiona
Czerniawska on the Present and Future of Consulting
Fiona
Czerniawska on Trends in Consulting
Fiona
Czerniawska on What's Next for Consulting
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