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In the early stages of development, you can pursue different marketing strategies as a base for thought Leadership programs.  

What is new: Choosing a clear anchor ⚓ for your Thought Leadership initiative defines which outcomes to expect.

Why it matters: Thought Leadership initiatives can start in three different ways ➡️↗️↘️, with varying impacts.

Vision as an anchor: An established or revamped vision can be your anchor. It focuses on where you as a company or your industry should go and is forward-looking enough to fit a 5 to 15-year horizon.

Programs with visions anchor the megatrends that reshape your and adjacent industries. You open the door to pursuing various thought leadership under a clear, long-term direction.

For this strategy, you pay close attention to the messages that carry the vision. A logical tree structure with 3-4 messages per level that links your messages together.

🔍 Characteristics: Thought Leadership programs with visions as anchors are characterized by:

• Visions that are ambitious and aspirational
• Focus on long-time horizons and the end-game
• Broad brush and direction setting

✅ Success factors for this approach are:

• A crisp flagship message – as opposed to longer sentences
• A message tree with 3-4 messages per branch – as opposed to a single tier with a variety of benefits/values
• Clear backing in strategy implementation initiatives to match your thought leadership story.

❌ Challenges to expect when working with visions as marketing anchors:

• It can be hard to break down into suitable strategy execution elements.
• It tends to over-gravitate on expanding on the end-game at the expense of how to get started.
• Reaching so far out in time can make breaking customer evolution paths in a precise sequence of actions hard.

Showcases as anchors: An alternative approach is to use showcases as anchors for your thought leadership program. At this stage, the showcases often link to new or existing technologies applied in a new way.

🔍 Characteristics: The most valuable showcases are newsworthy and focus on building excitement through seeing and believing. Communications and PR strategies are vital in announcing/launching showcases for maximum impact.

✅ Success factors: For this strategy, you pay extra attention to the stakeholder benefits for the target customers and the broader ecosystem.

• Attention-grabbing in nature.
• Demos that work in a new way with a credible path to scaling.
• Elements from partners in the ecosystem demonstrate a complete solution, not just the parts you control.
• Qualified and quantified stakeholder benefits for customers and ecosystem partners

❌ Challenges to expect: A showcase-centric thought leadership strategy needs to navigate a few challenges:

• Centered on how the technology works and technology-proof points, less on why and when it will happen
• Flashy showcases where the business problems and sub-problems to solve are less mature.
• A list of benefits with weak ideas about the resulting customer value proposition you can sell towards.  
• Tough transitions from showcases to practical cases and validated business cases.
• Exposed to the risk of promoting a solution looking for a problem

Business opportunities as anchor: The third option is to build thought leadership initiatives around strategic business opportunities. The opportunities are in the early stages of the market maturity, and you guide customers across the chasm into the tornado.  

Early on, A central challenge is to clarify the problems central to each opportunity. An innovation challenge is where you gradually evolve from multiple hypotheses for the problem and sub-problems until assumptions are validated and vetted.

🔍 Characteristics: The approach with strategic business opportunities as an anchor is:

• Outside-in and customer intimacy driven
• Business problem-centric
• Opportunity research-intensive

✅ Success factors: You find success for business opportunity-led thought leadership programs in the depth of your insights:

• Customer intimacy with lighthouse customers, especially customer zero.
• Build around strategic business opportunities – making the connection to your future business clear from the start.
• Relentless focus on articulating, validating, and tuning problem statements.
• Quantifying market sizes and revenue potentials, from rough order of magnitude estimates to marketable numbers.

❌ Challenges: The challenges you face are:

• Business opportunities are hard to frame in the early stages of market maturity.
• Avoid the trap of solutions that are looking for a problem.
• Hard prioritization of cases with clear links to your business.
• Build on concrete business uses – the use between showcase and actual use cases.
• Crisp answers to why and when – not just what it is.

Bottom line: Selecting a base for your thought leadership programs is a strategic choice you should plan to live with for 3-5 years.

Additional reading suggestions

• Use thought leadership to grow [OPINION PAPER] – by Bruce Rogers and Stephen Diorio for Forbes
• 5 ways to show your visionary leadership skills [ARTICLE] – by Rachel Wells, Forbes
• How to create a thought leadership strategy that drives innovation [BLOGPOST] – by Michael Brenner, Marketing Insider Group
• 5 things your board needs to know about innovation and thought leadership [BLOGPOST] – by Nicholas D. Evans for CIO