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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