Canada’s Globe and Mail Profiles The Bloom Group and Thought Leadership Marketing

Thought leadership marketing has gone mainstream.  The field, and The Bloom Group’s role in it, has been discovered by general-audience publications, the most recent of which is Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail.

On Jan. 28, Canada’s largest national newspaper published an article on thought leadership marketing entitled “’Thought leaders’ boost their bottom line.”  The article (read it here), by Kalyani Vittala, explained the rise of this marketing discipline and talked to companies that have used it. “Becoming a thought leader in your field is now considered one of the most effective ways to distinguish your brand in an overcrowded marketplace,” Vittala wrote.

She profiled two thought leadership marketing firms, a Toronto marketing agency (Highspot) and The Bloom Group.  Vittala also spoke to a McMaster University business school professor, Nick Bontis,  and University of Toronto marketing professor (David Dunne) about the field.

Vittala said Bloom Group co-founder Bob Buday was “considered one of the leaders in the field,” and spoke with one of the firm’s clients, Gershon Mader of Quantum Performance, a Toronto-based consulting firm. Mader called his firm’s adoption of thought leadership marketing “a complete transformation of what we were about, and that changed our professional life.” Mader said his firm’s extensive thought leadership marketing activities over the last five years (a white paper, opinion articles and a book) have increased the firm’s revenue threefold.

The Globe and Mail piece follows an Economist article last September that described how consulting firms were using thought leadership marketing to generate business.

Founded in 1844 and based in Toronto, The Globe and Mail has a daily circulation of 322,000 and is considered the country’s newspaper of record, with a total readership of 1 million across six Canadian cities.