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A Brief History of Thought Leadership Marketing

By Bob Buday

Where did thought leadership marketing start, what's driving it and why does it continue to grow? In this article, Bob describes how thought leadership marketing has evolved over the past 40 years, and how we got to where we are today.

Reengineering the White Paper - Pt 1

Why the first step in creating powerful white papers is one that is typically overlooked; creating a compelling point of view.

How Booz & Company Develops and Markets Consulting Concepts

Thomas A. Stewart and Art Kleiner direct thought leadership development and marketing at Booz & Company. The Bloom Group interviewed Stewart and Kleiner to explore how they manage the tasks of developing, codifying and marketing the intellectual capital of Booz consultants.

Identity and Expertise: Twin Engines to Power You through the Downturn

By Tony Tiernan and Robert Buday

Professional firms often struggle with who they truly are and proving their expertise. Here's how to address both issues. Read here.

Content Discontent: Turning Around a Thought Leadership Program

By Robert Buday

Many professional firms are unhappy with thought leadership marketing programs that aren’t delivering many good leads. This article explains how to turn around a program that is falling short. Read here.

Making the Most of Your Firm's Publications: A Portfolio Approach to Intellectual Capital Development

By Susan Buddenbaum, Bernie Thiel and Bob Buday

What if a venture capital firm funded entrepreneurs on a first-come, first-served basis with no questions asked? People with ideas from wacky to wonderful would get into business—more of them wacky, no doubt, given the high failure rate for new businesses. Of course, the VC wouldn't last very long. Without screening new-business ideas and the people behind them, it eventually would fritter away its capital after so many bad investments.

Case Study Research: The Overlooked But Indispensable Tool in Attaining Thought Leadership

By Bob Buday

case study research robotNearly every professional services firm today recognizes the market power of “thought leadership”—the ability to demonstrate differentiated and superior expertise on an issue. By publishing articles and research reports, delivering conference presentations and authoring books that lay out a novel diagnosis of and solution to a business problem, these firms can generate robust demand, often even when the economy is slow.

Survey Says: Strong Intellectual Capital Is The Key to Effective Professional Services Marketing

By Bob Buday, Bernie Thiel, and Susan Buddenbaum

U.S. professional services firms said having strong intellectual capital (IC) was the most important ingredient of effective marketing—more important than having a compelling brand, big marketing budget, a sound marketing strategy or capable sales force, according to a recent survey conducted by The Bloom Group (Exhibit 1). And the firms claiming to have the best IC were far more likely than those reporting inferior IC to generate substantial market awareness and leads for their services.

Competing on Thought Leadership: The Seven Hallmarks of Compelling Intellectual Capital

By Bob Buday and Bernie Thiel

Beginning to resemble publishing houses, professional services firms sell book after book and issue countless self-published magazines and papers, flooding the marketplace with their insights. They are recognizing the power of seminal ideas that create order out of chaotic issues. They are seeing how so-called “thought leadership” can generate a raft of strong leads and unique service offerings when competition for executive “share of mind” is unprecedented and differentiation is harder to establish.

Creating Economies of Content: The Power of a Point of View

By Bob Buday

Value of a Business Point of ViewTo get clients to respond to their marketing campaigns, professional services firms must demonstrate deep and novel insights on business issues--a business point of view. Such insights capture client attention by making high-stakes, confusing issues coherent. And they lower the risk of choosing the wrong advisor.

After 10 years of beating the drum for thought leadership, we are heartened to see so many professional services firms embracing it. The term now generates 1.5 million Google hits. It has its own Wikipedia entry. And it even has been adopted as the nameplate of a conference company (Thought Leadership Summits Inc.).