Thought leadership

By Rachel Ainsworth.

I bought a new house recently, and the process of having it refurbished has made me a perfect target for cross-selling. The hard floors in the hallway? Fitted by the same firm that provided the carpets in the lounge. The tiling in the bathrooms? Provided by the same guy who carefully fitted new doors throughout. Our new oven? Bought from our go-to department store.

Could I have sourced what I needed more cheaply? No doubt. Would the end result have been as good? I don’t know. For all the decisions above, and many more, it was easy to go with the tried-and-tested option, with people I’d already had a good experience working with. And consulting projects are no different.

However, in making the decision to cross-buy, I did need to know that this other product or service was on offer, and I did need to be confident that the firm was as proficient in this new area as it was in the area of my original purchase. Buyers of consulting services are no different. And most of them are influenced by thought leadership.¹ Could your firm be doing more with thought leadership to let previous buyers know what else you have on offer, and to convince them of your expertise in this as yet untested area?

By Rachel Ainsworth

Have you heard: The average attention span is down from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to eight seconds now? That is less than the nine-second attention span of your average goldfish.

The dissemination of this somewhat alarming data can be tracked back to a Microsoft report published in 2015 which has been the catalyst for articles in a range of illustrious publications including Time magazine, The Telegraph, and The New York Times, and continues to be quoted. The falling attention span sounds intuitively correct. And the comparison with the lowly goldfish makes for an attention-grabbing and memorable statistic.

Some professional services firms appear to have responded to the falling attention span, shifting some—if not all—thought leadership from chunky publications to much lighter articles online. See, for example, EY’s Building a better working world, or The Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG’s) much greater use of short pieces on BCG.com compared to its portfolio of content previously published on BCG Perspectives.