What tic-tac-toe can teach you about a great thought leadership structure! 

/ April 1, 2024

© Tweeter Linder 2024 – All rights reserved—photo by iStock.

Thought leadership must match the broader themes your customers care about and the topics they seek answers to now. These two pillars and tik-tak-toe are great starting points for defining a thought leadership structure. 

🧭⏱ The thought leadership conundrum: Thought leaders need to balance broader themes where you have brand recognition and topics that are at the forefront of customers’ minds. 

➡️ Jumping between topics where you lack brand recognition is a waste of time, and not refreshing the topics under your themes makes you irrelevant. 

⭕️❌⭕️ Tic-Tac-Toe: The beauty of the game lies in its simplicity. Thought leaders can copy the 3-by-3 format as a starting point for a solid thought leadership structure for themes and topics. 

🔥 Themes represent strategic challenges your customers face and where you have matching core capabilities. 👂Topics come from customer conversations and represent what your customers want to discuss now or shortly. 

♻️ Three themes: The three themes should reflect the core of your strategic thought leadership ambitions, where you both have insights and plan to invest in reinforcing your thought leadership. A theme has longevity and should have the potential to be a multi-year endeavor.

Your brand recognition and your company’s size limit the number of themes you can support. Even large enterprises benefit from picking their first three themes well, representing the core of their capabilities. 

➡️↘️↗️ Three topics: Topics are tactical and more short-term in nature and reflect the key questions where your customers seek answers and want to take action.

Topics match well-formulated questions where your thought leadership material supports your customers in making decisions and moving into action. 

🥒🫒🍉 Topic refresh: Plan to refresh topics continuously. Review topics quarterly to ensure they are still relevant. Aim to refresh existing topics bi-yearly, with revised facts and insights, even if the underlying questions remain relevant. 

Once a question loses momentum, other questions will likely grow in importance and should become prioritized topics. 

🔪 Topics can be expanded beyond three to four or five for complex themes where you have significant insights. Aim to sharpen your thought leadership insights for the three initial topics before expanding, and always keep all topics sharp.

🍏🍐🍊Theme refresh: Themes are more complex to change as they rely on brand and research strengths. Select themes carefully and refresh them by updating and rotating questions. 

A theme where customer interest has declined or where there are limited new questions to address is a candidate to be retired. Retiring a theme can be done without adding a new one. 

But when your core thought leadership capabilities are outside demand, your business likely needs you to stand up a new theme. A strategic initiative where theme selection, associated research, and brand building are vital. 

⏰⏲⏱ Refresh cycles: As a rule of thumb, rotate one topic at a time and limit the cadence to one per quarter. For themes, limit expansion/rotations to one per year. 

This approach forces you to see themes as investments and to pick questions with a short-to-medium-term impact. When played right, you enjoy long runways to build buzz around. 

Bottom line: All thought leadership initiatives rely on a concise structure. 🧬 A structure designed to maximize your influence on your customers and your impact on the market. ⬆️

You play Thought Leadership with silver bullets, and a tic-tak-toe structure brings the required focus to your program. 

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