Speeches RainToday webinar, Marketing & Selling Is Everyone's Job: How to Create a Culture of Growth at Your Firm, Dec. 11, 2008 Marketing Partner Forum 2009, Taking Your Program into the 21st Century: Lessons from Top Marketers at Non-Legal Professional Service Firms -- Moderator: Suzanne Lowe, Jan 29, 2009 News SMPS Connections featured this newsletter as a "Tool of the Week," September 2008 The View from the Other Side: B2B Marketing Practices from Other Industries, ITSMA, June 2008. Adapting to a Downturn, Suzanne Lowe and Ford Harding, The Council of Public Relations Firms. May 2008. Read a summary of Suzanne Lowe's upcoming book The Integration Imperative™. New from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog Thought Leadership: the light at the end of the tunnel? STILL the only verified link between marketing measurement and effectiveness Taking baby steps toward better serving clients See all the posts at the Expertise Marketplace blog Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed for regular updates. (Need RSS help?) Subscribe Did a colleague forward this newsletter? Sign up to receive your own copy. "I LOVE your newsletter. I think it’s the best one I get. Full of real content and yet not too long. Kudos!" Diane Schmalensee, Facilitator and President of Schmalensee Partners Recent Issues Expectations for Marketing Experts - Geting Closer to Clients, October 2008 Expectations for Marketing Experts - Roles, ROI and Influence, September 2008 Cross Markets Aren't So Different, August 2008 You can order Marketplace Masters from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, your favorite online bookseller, or CEO-READ.

The Marketplace Master™ is a monthly email publication on professional service marketing from Expertise Marketing, LLC.

About this month's issue

This month I continue my series on expectations for marketing experts with an article on thought leadership. What do you think about the role of thought leadership activities during economic times like these?

Last month’s article on Getting Closer to Clients generated some interesting responses. Among them, Susan Rangus of Rohrbach Associates wondered if the number-hating person I wrote about was simply more creative than quantitative, and was realistic to recognize her limitations. And Kenneth Sawka of Outward Insights shared the frustration of working with firms that don’t understand the ROI of client research and therefore don’t do it.

Suzanne Lowe
President, Expertise Marketing
Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service Firms Compete to Win

Expectations for Marketing Experts - Thought Leadership

I've been writing in this newsletter lately about what should be expected of marketing experts (and of course what we should expect from ourselves). What is their role regarding a firm’s thought leadership? And should today’s challenging economy affect whether a firm invests in this activity? Fiona Czerniawska's February 2007 article on thought leadership in Mike McLaughlin's fantastic Management Consulting News brings timeless perspective to the expectations issue.

Czerniawska reported on her research about the comparative amount of thought leadership activities of several global consulting firms. Her remarks triggered my renewed focus on the differences between a firm's publishing for volume's sake versus (in my opinion) the more competitively potent thought leadership that uniquely benefits a firm's clients. Czerniawska agrees:

"In a crowded market it’s important to be a thought leader rather than a thought follower—to find the topics or angles that others haven’t considered—the white space."

This is where the rubber meets the road for marketing experts: to know the difference between a puffed up writing activity ("let's publish a white paper!") and competitively advantaged intellectual capital. Marketers (and a firm's practitioners) should have the professional bravery to ask themselves:

• "Do I have the intellectual heft and internal political influence to tell my fee-earning colleagues that they need to develop more cutting-edge intellectual capital than they currently have?"
  
  
• "Can I collaborate, share accountability and demonstrate significant proactivity on these thought leadership initiatives and client value-added solutions? Will the practitioners put their skin in the game?"
  
  
• "Do I have an excellent grasp of three things: our clients' access to beneficial solutions; the state-of-the-art thinking in their industry; and the thought leadership output of our competitors?"

Professional service firms will need to attract, retain and promote marketing experts who have the skills to handle these challenges, and can embed the solutions into the fabric of their organizations.

There are a few firms who have made thought leadership a central part of their competitive strategy. Czerniawska's research focused on the management consulting arena; McKinsey, Booz & Co., and Bain among others. For those of us who follow the marketplace of management consulting firms, it's a no-brainer to see the cutting-edge thought leadership output of these and a select few others. Czerniawska's work (thought leadership itself) provides further clarity on what is and is not thought leadership.

No matter what professional service sector we may consider, though, it takes client- and competitor-savvy marketers to drive their firms toward the embrace of powerful thought leadership (and not just noise).

For a firm that wants to make gains in "the thought leadership white space," it will take:

• A marketer who is extremely well grounded in that firm's service portfolio, and who knows where those services fit in the panoply of intellectual capital and services that the clients can access.
• Direction from the firm's management for the marketer's deep interaction with the firm's practitioners, to both mine the knowledge that resides in the practitioners' heads and to prod and push where it appears that intellectual capital is dated.
• Support from the firm's management executives for that marketer's contact with clients to gain new perspectives about what's really new and simultaneously beneficial.

Effectively evolving a firm’s intellectual capital and its byproduct, thought-leadership, becomes even more important in difficult economic times. Now, more than ever, an integrated working relationship between marketers and practitioners is critical in order to answer these questions: How can we add to or re-shape our intellectual capital to anticipate our clients’ emerging needs, while also helping our firm gain market share, and grow “the right” kind of revenues? How can we deliver our thought leadership in newly creative ways that work for clients in these challenging times?

One thing is clear: the issue of thought leadership is big. To maximize their competitive advantage, firms need to clarify the expectations of marketing professionals and their internal practitioner clients. And the sooner firms figure this out the better.

Your feedback is important to us. Please contact us with your comments and questions.

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