Introduction

Many have long believed that thought leadership delivers business value, but no one has been able to prove it - until now.

Between 2021 and 2023, we interviewed more than 4,000 C-level executives across four separate surveys. We asked them about their consumption of thought leadership content and the influence it has on their business purchase decisions and investments. Perhaps most important, we asked: Does thought leadership deliver quantifiable business impact? For whom? And how much?

Half of the executives we surveyed were CEOs, who lead organizations with annual revenues of $29 billion or more. The remaining 50% comprised CFOs, CSCOs, CTOs, CIOs, and when it came to questions specifically about generative AI, CMOs. All-in-all, a representative sample of the world's most influential C-suite decision makers.

Whenever you see data represented in this book, unless otherwise indicated, it will be from one or more of these surveys. A detailed methodology can be found in the Appendix.

Results from the surveys and our analysis around them were astounding. Across industries and geographies, nearly all executives reported that the thought leadership they consume not only helps them make better business decisions, it also directly influences their buying decisions.

Beyond ROI, our research also found that thought leadership that includes original research, rigorous analysis, and subject matter expertise drives hundreds of billions in corporate spending annually. When it is viewed as independent of the producing organization's sales activity, there is a positive spillover effect: organizations that produce it are perceived as more trustworthy and are rewarded more of the overall spend than their more overtly commercial peers.

Even though thought leadership is often perceived as a cost center, our data shows thought leadership is, in fact, a revenue driver that is underappreciated, underutilized, and little understood in most organizations.

Why Thought Leadership - And Why Now?

Thought leadership is a critical tool for executives operating in uncharted territory. It lets business leaders explore problems without the bias inherent in internal brainstorms. It provides provocative, evidence-based insights. Building on primary research, external expertise, and practical examples, it delivers intelligence that helps leaders make smarter, faster business decisions.

Even so, until now, the real value of thought leadership has been elusive. Return on investment (ROI) calculations have been based on assumptions and leaps of faith rather than real-world data. That's partly because the world's largest thought leadership-producing organizations have traditionally been the world's largest strategy consultancies. Many have used thought leadership content to drive business growth for a century or more.

Partners in those firms are measured and rewarded on how much thought leadership they publish, so the consultancies produce thousands of reports each year, distributed to millions of readers. Consulting partners will tell you they don't care about calculating the ROI because thought leadership IS their business model.

They just know it works. The rest of us have to prove it. That's what this book aims to do.

The Wizardry of Evidence-Based Intelligence

The first written reference to thought leadership appeared in the 1876 Theistic Annual, which described Ralph Waldo Emerson as demonstrating the "wizard power of a thought-leader." Fast forward a century or so to 1994, and economist Joel Kurtzman, the founding editor of Strategy+Business magazine, is credited with resurfacing "thought leadership" and placing it in a modern context. He wrote, thought leaders "have distinctively original ideas, unique points of view, and new insights."1

Wizardry aside, we define thought leadership as distinctive, evidence-based intelligence that gives leaders the insights they need to make better business decisions. It builds trust and credibility - which may be why so many executives regularly spend time with thought leadership. Almost 9 in 10 (88%) executives say they spend about two hours each week consuming thought leadership.

Why are they so invested? Almost all (96%) business leaders who consume thought leadership say they make better decisions as a result. And those results inspire them to take action: 87% of executives say they made a specific purchase decision in the previous 90 days as a direct result of consuming thought leadership.

By our estimates, the cumulative value of purchases made directly as a result of executives consuming thought leadership is $265 billion each year globally, more than $100 billion in the United States.

Those are big numbers. We'll unpack them later. But first, we need to understand what thought leadership is and isn't, and its rightful role in an organization's marketing mix.

Why This Book?

Our groundbreaking research calculates the data-informed ROI of a thought leadership practice for the first time. Calculations are based on real data - survey-reported business results - not expectations or estimates. And the results are eye-opening.

Thought leadership delivers an ROI of 156%, which is 16 times more effective than typical marketing approaches.2 We calculate that organizations around the globe purchase $265 billion in products and services annually as a result of executives consuming thought leadership. In the United States alone, the opportunity for thought leadership-producing organizations is upwards of $100 billion.

In this book, we will explore the specific calculations behind these figures, discuss how executives use thought leadership, and quantify the exponential value that comes from producing thought leadership that is trustworthy and independent of the organization's commercial activity. We will also share a ROI calculator that organizations can use to justify the value of thought leadership in budget negotiations.

Marketers take note: While the debate about thought leadership's role in marketing will rage on, the returns it produces - both long and short term - can't be ignored. Thought leadership is so crucial that you might think of it as the new 8th P of Marketing - the platform on which every other promotion should be built.

Why Us?

Who better to investigate the value of thought leadership than those who produce it for a living - those who do research every day and turn it into the insights that are used by executives to make business decisions impacting organizations and industries on a global scale . those who have spent a career using thought leadership to generate interest, engender loyalty, and build brands.

In this book, we turn the research lens on our own thought leadership discipline, to investigate and quantify the value of our chosen practice.

To do that, we conducted a series of anonymous, double-blind surveys. This means the respondents had no idea who was sponsoring the survey and we did not know who the individual respondents were or what organizations they were from. The 4,000 executives we surveyed spanned 16 countries and 20 industries (see study methodology in the Appendix). Answer options were randomized, meaning if two people sitting side-by-side were responding to the survey, the way their answer options were presented would be different. As such, bias was mitigated. To supplement that research, we conducted a targeted examination of the impact of generative AI, surveying an additional 300 US-based executives about thought leadership that is produced using generative AI.

This book proves the value of thought leadership for producing organizations and serves as a "how-to" for those who want to claim their share of the global $265 billion opportunity ($100 billion in the United States) by creating and sustaining a world-class thought leadership program that delivers proven, quantifiable business value.

Thought Leadership as the 8th P of the Marketing Mix

Modern marketers routinely think of their work in seven categories:

• Product: The physical offering or service.
• Price: How much customers are willing to pay for the product or service.
• Place: Distribution channels, retail locations, online platforms, and logistics.
• Promotion: Advertising, sales promotions, public relations, social media marketing, and any other methods used to create awareness and generate interest in the offering.
• People: Human factors at play in marketing, typically around services.
• Process: Procedures, mechanisms, and flow of activities by which service is delivered.
• Physical evidence: The environment where service occurs.

For a comprehensive overview of the marketing mix, see the Wikipedia entry.3

Because of its immense and distinct value in anchoring the brand funnel, we are proposing that thought leadership as a platform (quite separate from the "promotions" listed above, which by its definition attracts interest in a particular product or service), becomes established as the 8th P of the marketing mix.

What Thought Leadership Isn't

Fake thought leadership is everywhere - especially now when any fledgling prompt engineer can use generative AI to create some content. So...