Emerging Markets Thought Leadership: passing the “so what?” test

When I was at university I was lucky enough to be tutored by a world famous historian, who will not have realised at the time that he was teaching me important lessons about consulting firms’ thought leadership (not that I realised either). My tutor was known for saying a particular phrase, which I now find myself employing on a regular basis.

Imagine the situation. It’s Thursday morning. It’s a three hour seminar. You’ve probably been out to the union bar the night before, and it probably shows. You are debating a thorny issue, and inevitably the conversation starts to stray into parts of the reading list which you hadn’t quite got around to reading. He shoots questions like poisoned intellectual arrows, you conjure up an answer – anything – to sound like you know what you are talking about. What seems like an eternity of silence follows while your point is considered; and then he drops the dreaded, “so what?”

So what? Oh. You’ve got me. I’ve supplied an answer, filled the silence, but what is the real significance of what I’m saying? Why does it matter? Why say it at all?

Nowadays, I find myself being the one asking the “so what?” question when reviewing thought leadership, and particularly with this year’s emerging market pieces. Firms are fairly good at finding relevant subjects and fresh viewpoints, and many are producing reports that area easy on the eye and engaging enough to keep your attention to the end. Some articles are so good they wouldn’t feel out of place in The Economist, which is all very nice, but they neglect one of the key purposes of thought leadership. Nearly all firms are struggling to leave the reader with a sense of what they are supposed to do with what they’ve read, or to instil any sense of how their firm can help with the issues highlighted. Given this is the primary marketing mechanism for consulting firms, there is little point in producing thought leadership that leaves the reader thinking, “hmmm, interesting”, before  tucking the report away in a drawer, never to see the light of day again.

What’s going on? Are firms suffering from shyness, or are they just at a loss as to how to position their work without being an out-and-out sales pitch? It’s a tricky balance to strike, but the firms that linked the content to the reader, and then to their own services, were all in the top half of the ratings. The rest could do with someone playing the wizened old university professor role, relentlessly asking, “So what?”