Thought leadership in the age of mass-customisation

The narrower your focus, the bigger your audience: it doesn’t sound right, does it?

Accustomed to the idea of mass-media, we assume that material with the broadest appeal will be read by the most people.  But the internet and social media may invert that relationship: because people can pick and choose what they want to see, they’re more likely to look at material which focuses on their interests than at more generic content.

This is certainly what we’ve concluded from asking people how they react to the thought leadership consulting firms send to them.  The more senior a person is, the more important thought leadership is: “In my position,” said one senior executive we spoke to, “there are relatively few places I can go to get new ideas about my business – consulting firms’ thought leadership is one of them.”  But – and it’s a very big but, said this executive – “it has to be relevant to me.”

Almost everyone we speak to makes the same point, but it raises some interesting questions about how to do this in practice.  In a perfect world, clients would like to see thought leadership developed with their unique needs in mind – one-to-one marketing, if you like.  But that’s not feasible from a consulting firm’s point of view: thought leadership requires investment and the best return is likely to come from ensuring that a single piece of research can be relevant to as wide an audience as possible.  But therein lies the problem: the wider the intended audience, the less likely it is that any one person will think it relevant to them.  In other words, in looking for the best possible return, most firms end up with the worst.

All of which brings us to mass-customisation, in which one wide-ranging piece of research is done as efficiently as possible, but the results are then cut up in different ways, for different sectors and different group of readers.  And, in our experience, this has an added benefit: the highest-quality thought leadership is always that written with a very clear audience in mind, so the challenge and opportunity here is not simply to slap on an opening paragraph that talks about – say – the situation in financial services or the role of the CIO, but to work out what the messages arising out of the research mean for these organisations and people.  But that’s not enough: what every senior manager would like (and the more senior they are the truer this is) is thought leadership that’s written exclusively for them.

One solution is to ensure that any material sent to them comes with a personal note from someone they know saying why they should read it. Not every piece of thought leadership will be relevant, so an important part of this process will also be to pick and choose who gets what more precisely.  Another approach (and they’re complementary, not mutually exclusive) is to let people choose for themselves by displaying the data in such a way that they can effectively create their own thought leadership, as the latest version of IBM’s CEO study illustrates.  Tools already exist for people to build their own journals, although they’re not particularly sophisticated and it would be interesting to see consulting firms adopting some app which allowed their readers to mix and match material from different firms. After all, the final stage of mass-customisation will be to allow readers to be their own editors.