Outthinkers
The Outthinkers podcast is a growth strategy podcast hosted by Kaihan Krippendorff. Each week, Kaihan talks with forward-looking strategists and innovators that are challenging the status quo, leading the future of business, and shaping our world.
Chief strategy officers and executives can learn more and join the Outthinker community at https://outthinkernetwork.com/.
Outthinkers
#140—Cindy Anderson: The Quantifiable ROI of Thought Leadership
Cindy Anderson is the Chief Marketing Officer/Global Lead for Engagement & Eminence at the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV). Cindy has co-authored research reports, published numerous articles, and delivered presentations on thought leadership, diversity, strategy implementation, project management, and technology to global audiences.
She is a founding board member of the Global Thought Leadership Institute at APQC, a new association that advances the practice of thought leadership, and as you heard in the highlight clip, she is passionate about helping organizations quantify the tangible benefits and critical role of thought leadership. In this episode we dive into her just-published book The ROI of Thought Leadership: Calculating the Value that Sets Organizations Apart, which she co-authored with Anthony Marshall. As you know, almost every guest we have on this podcast is a thought-leader in some form and in this episode we get to actually explore the topic of thought-leadership itself.
In this episode we discuss the role of thought leadership, and its interrelation to an organization's various branches through highlights from her book The ROI of Thought Leadership.
In this episode, Cindy shares:
- How thought leadership is in fact, quantifiable, and what her organization’s research reveals are the top metrics that indicate the value delivered
- How organizations can leverage thought leadership to grow their brand’s authority and credibility—and what to avoid in damaging it
- The types of content you can deliver in thought leadership, with pointed markers of what makes good content (as well as what formats are in or out among content consumers)
- The role of GenAI within thought leadership—and why it cannot (and to a degree must not) be taken as thought leadership itself
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Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
01:14—Introducing Cindy + the topic of today’s episode
03:55—If you really know me, you know that...
06:05—What is your definition of strategy?
07:20—Quantifying thought leadership
11:30—Three core metrics for evaluating thought leadership
13:40—Thought leadership’s role in reaching ecosystems and partners
15:40—Placement of thought leadership in organizations
19:01—Key aspects of good content
21:18—Independence and trust as critical success levers
24:05—The enduring value of PowerPoint, books, and print for executives
26:55—The role of AI in thought leadership
33:05—Content portfolio for thought leadership
36:45—Individual vs. organizational thought leadership
39:35—Key takeaway on thought leadership’s value
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Additional Resources:
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/clwanderson48
Link to book: Thought Leadership
Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.
Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast
Kaihan Krippendorff: Cindy, thank you so much for joining us. We've been looking forward to having this conversation. I know that you recently moved to Singapore so it's evening as we record this. Thank you for staying up for us. What was your motivation to move to Singapore?
Cindy Anderson: Well, it's a new experience, and I'm never opposed to having a new experience. So there was an opportunity to move with IBM, and I took it.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Right. And that must be one of the benefits of working on a platform as large as IBM is that there are lots of pads and opportunities for you to choose from. Lovely.
Cindy Anderson: Yeah. Things you never expected just sort of open up.
Kaihan Krippendorff: I'm excited to dive into your book. I didn't think of myself really as doing thought leadership, but we do. And I learned so much, and so I'm very excited to dig in. We won't have time to cover everything. Look, we have a great book that people can find. I wanna open up with two questions that I always ask all of our guests. The first is just for us to get to know you a little bit more personally, could you complete this sentence for me? If you really know me, you know that.
Cindy Anderson: You know that I try to do something new and different every week, and that's even more me now that I've moved to Singapore, and there's just so much to explore. So, for example, we have Hari Raya, which is, you know, now. And so I've been able to experience some iftar with some friends, which I've never done before. We had just had the holy holiday, which is an Indian holiday. And my friends and I went to a celebration where we got covered with all kinds of bright colored paints, which was awesome.
Obviously, there's a ton of different kinds of food in Singapore. So I've been exploring those things like Lhasa and something as simple as chicken rice, but boy did they do it differently here. So I try to do something new every week.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Interesting. And why is that? What motivates you to do something different?
Cindy Anderson: Well, it's pretty easy to sit in front of a computer. And, you know, when you're working kinda day, hours in the office, and night hours on calls, it's pretty easy to just get, you know, tied up in in doing work, which is great, and there's a, you know, a lot of time to do that. But if you don't try to do something new and experience where you are, it's just too easy to do what you've always done. You know, would just sort of sit at your computer or, you know, scroll through Instagram or turn on the TV and, you know, binge watch something on Netflix. And so I made this sort of agreement with myself that I was gonna do something new every week while I live in Singapore because, again, there's a lot to do that I've never done before, and I wanna be able to say that I've done it all of my time in Singapore ends.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. At some point, I'd love to pull on that thread again as we talk about the portfolio of thought leadership. Because I think some thought leadership from organizations is sort of one thing that is said many times in many different ways. Some of it is sort of a new thing every time, and it seems like having the right balance. Excellent.
And what is your definition of strategy?
Cindy Anderson: I define strategy as ideas when they're implemented effectively that drive an organization forward. So what I mean by that is lots of people have ideas. Lots of people do stuff. But very rarely do the two things come together. I worked for many years at an organization called The Project Management Institute.
And all of the thought leadership research we did there indicated that strategies fail at the implementation level. A lot of them, upwards of, you know, three quarters of strategies fail. And it's really because of that disconnect between the idea and the actual implementation that doing it. So that's why I think, you know, having an idea is great, but I don't think you can have a real strategy unless you have that implementation capability as well.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. Which I think brings us to the next we did have Antonio Nieto on our podcast a couple weeks ago.
Cindy Anderson: Antonio is great. He was a board director when I was there, so I know him well.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. He's great. Now there is the doing, and there are the ideas. And what I think is interesting about your book is that you seem to take on this idea that thought leadership is sort of very long term. It's very squishy.
It is hard to measure. It's hard to track. Does that actually lead to an actual sale in a project? So, you know, many people believe it's not possible to quantify, what motivated you to take that on, and what do you find?
Cindy Anderson: Exactly what you said. Many people believe it's not possible to quantify, you know, for the twenty, twenty five years that my colleague, Anthony, my coauthor, and I have been working in thought leadership. We've heard over and over. Well, how do you know? Why should I spend money on thought leadership instead of something else?
You can't tell me how valuable it is. You know, you tell me it's long term. You tell me it's that it's relationship building. You tell me it's at the top of the funnel. So we said, you know, we do this for a living.
We investigate business problems. We do research that helps us find an insight around a business problem. So if anybody can do this, it's gotta be us. Right? Who else is who else is gonna do this?
We send to each other. So we said, alright. Well, let's put a survey together. Let's see what we can ask the people who consume thought leadership at the executive decision making level, and let's see what they tell us. So we did.
We created a survey. We interviewed several surveys, actually. Three or four surveys over the course of eighteen months or two years. Four thousand c suite executives, average revenue, $29,000,000,000. So big companies half of them are CEOs and half are other members of the c suite.
And we ask them if they use that leadership, how often? What types of that leadership they use? What impact it has on their business decision making, and what they do with it on the, you know, on the back end.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Just one clarification question that's listening to this. You're interviewing them as a recipient of thought leadership or as a generator of thought?
Cindy Anderson: Correct. Yes. Yep. The executives who we spoke to or interview, we did surveys with these 4,000 executives, and they were the consumers of thought leadership. So the business decision makers who use thought leadership in order to what we learned was fill gaps in data, fill gaps in analysis that they have in their own organization.
You know, looking for business insight or technology insight or strategic insight or economic insight. That they don't get in their own organization. And so we ask them all of those questions. And turns out, they told us. They gave us the answers.
They told us exactly what they do with it. They told us how often they use thought leadership. And they told us in fact, 87% of the CEOs told us that they made a specific purchase decision on the basis of thought leadership that they consumed in the last ninety days. That's the first time I've ever seen and I've been doing this for a very long time. Quantifiable data that indicates that executives use thought leadership to make business decisions.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Amazing. Yeah. Because I guess, traditionally, it's been sort of as you say, top of the funnel, brand awareness building, brand shaping.
Cindy Anderson: And it is. Don't get me wrong. It's the, you know, top very top of the funnel. It's demand creation, it's awareness building, it's consideration, because if you don't if the thought leadership team can't get your organization into the consideration set, then you're basically doing some other kind of content marketing. But that's really where thought leadership plays.
It is a long term approach. It's not anything we'd ever tell any marketer to undertake if they're looking to do one study on one topic, one time, and achieve the kind of ROI that we received when we did the survey. It really is long term, and it's a commitment, and it's an investment, and it's the platform on which other marketing programs need to be built. And that's why the return is so high.
Kaihan Krippendorff: And you lay out, like, three different types of metrics. Right? You've got quality metrics. You've got uniqueness metrics. You've got reach metrics.
Can you just unpack those for us? What's quality? What's uniqueness? And what's reach?
Cindy Anderson: Absolutely. So we have the three metrics that we look at measuring from a thought leadership perspective we're evaluating, really. Quality uniqueness and reach. Quality is really about the answers. To your research questions that inform your thought leadership, and that's about the insight.
It's what is it that you are offering to your consumer, your thought leadership consumer from an insight perspective that helps them make a smarter business decision. It solves a business problem or lights a bulb in their mind on an issue that they've been dealing with. And because of the research that you've done, you understand that perspective, that challenge. And then the insight from that research is the quality. The uniqueness metric is really around the questions that you ask.
So what is it? How are you going to assess what a bit a business leader needs to make those better business decisions. So when we were thinking about the doing the research for this book, we said what are the questions that we need to ask in order to find the answers that are gonna help solve our business problem, which is how collating the ROI of thought leadership. So that's the kind of unique approach that you would wanna take. So quality is the answers, uniqueness is the questions, and then reach is really what you do with it afterward.
How do you get it into your potential consumer's hands? How do you build relationships using thought leadership? How do you distribute and promote the thought leadership that you've built in a way that puts your organization in that consideration set in a way that builds awareness, in a way that creates loyalty to the brand. So those are the three sort of main kind of buckets, that we look at when we, you know, figure out kinda how to measure the value of thought leadership.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Now you're talking a lot about the buyer, the decision maker. However, I think and you think you alluded to this, as we are competing increasingly with partners and ecosystems, thought leadership also plays that role there. I think of Deere and Company, who has transformed itself to a great extent, driven by its thought leadership and precision agriculture, and that was directed at farmers certainly, but also at all these other partners. Do anything to say to that?
Cindy Anderson: I think the when you're thinking about the reach, you really have to think about it from a couple of perspectives. You think about who your potential target audience is and who your potential collaborators are. So your partners or your other members of your ecosystem could be either one. In our case, we do at the IBM Institute for Business Value, we do a lot of co branding, which is pretty unusual in the thought leadership world. We co brand with multiple ecosystem partners on topics of interest to both of us, which serves to, as you would imagine, you know, build the prints of both organizations and reach clients in ways that one or the other might not be able to on their own.
Alternatively, from a target audience perspective, and I think this is what you're talking about with with Deere, is that the your ecosystem partners could potentially be an audience for your thought leadership. So that they understand what it is that you're doing, your organization is doing based on research with the target audience that they might not know about. Right? So it's helping your ecosystem partner solve that business problem by delivering insight to them to help them make a smarter business decision. Obviously, you hope it's, you know, working with you as part of the ecosystem in your organization.
So you can look at it from both different perspectives when you think about ecosystem partners.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. So where do you think thought leadership should sit in the organization? You talked about, you know, yours at IBM sits in an institute. I could see it sitting in marketing. I could see in sales, people just reverse engineering.
How do I get this customer to read this to make this decision? So in your experience talking to where other people place it, where do you think it should fit?
Cindy Anderson: It what we found is that it doesn't matter so much where thought leadership sets, what matters is how it's connected to the rest of the organization. And the most important thing about thought leadership wherever it's produced is that it needs to be held at arm's length. From any of the commercial aspects of the enterprise. Because the minute that an audience starts to feel like this is a sales pitch or this is veering too close to a product you know, kind of pitch or sale, they back off and walk away. And we found that independence of thought leadership from the commercial or the sales arm of the enterprise there's actually a purchase premium based on that, based on our research when you do have that arms length.
So it can sit in any part of the organization, but the function needs to be really arms length. And media companies are pretty familiar with that. Right? There's a lot of media organizations where the advertising arm and editorial arm are completely separate. It's similar to that from a concept point of view.
Yes. So you wanna be separate from that sales or commercial arm.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. Okay. That makes sense. That that if media companies, yeah, have a long history of doing that, the ones that do it well, there is sort of a blending. I do find there is.
I know media companies now have often a commercial arm that looks a lot like content. You can pay them to produce an article and advertise and create an event There is this constant. I feel that also in our little teeny organization, we've got three podcasts, we've got a newsletter, we post on other places, and we have our members that are also we feature and create content, But there is this constant tension between the marketing sales team that's, like, less right about this person on this topic, and then just what you feel the world needs.
Cindy Anderson: Yeah. And it's interesting that and you know, this is the conundrum of thought leadership, which is the more you try to sell, the less you actually build your relationship. And we can see that in the research. We can see it in the data. When you don't try to sell, but you focus on building the relationship and your audience knows that, you know, you're not doing this out of the goodness of your heart.
You're doing it because there's a benefit for your organization. Right? But you gotta kinda walk that line, which is let the research tell the story, let the data tell the story, don't let that kind of internal perspective in your organization tell the story. Don't start from that perspective. Let the data tell the story.
And organization are leaders, executive consumers know, you know, that it's coming from an organization that has a perspective.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. Tell us a little bit more about I mean, you just you just spark three questions in my mind, so we will we won't be able to go through all of them. But just tell us a little bit what are some of the key aspects of what makes good content. You talk about, for example, proprietary data being important. What are some of the other attributes that may be a little more tangible that we can use to lease ourselves more effectively that we're actually producing good content and not just Yeah.
Just treat yourselves.
Cindy Anderson: The two most important elements of good quality thought leadership are that data, that proprietary research and we know that research is immensely important to the executives who consume thought leadership. They tell us it's the most important piece. Proprietary research that is research that your organization does on its own is the most valuable, but many organizations. Some, you know, McKinsey's and some of the other organizations use third party data and do an interesting analysis. That's the second most important thing, is that expert perspective.
So the combination of data and a subject matter expert analysis are the two things that are really the most meaningful to executives when they look at quality, thought leadership. And interesting, I didn't mention this. Executives who we interviewed tell us that they typically consume thought leadership from five trusted organizations. Those five aren't the same for every executive, and that's why it's really important for producers of thought leadership to figure out how to get that mix right, how to get the data, how to get the, you know, the expert insights that quality uniqueness and reach, how to get those mixed up the right way for their organization, because if they can be in the top five for their target audience, then that's where the ROI gets really amazing that the magnitude of the ROI gets really large. If you're not in that top five, and that that's kinda what we talk about in the book is that's what you really wanna trust strive for is to get in the top five trusted leader thought leadership producing organizations among your target audience.
Kaihan Krippendorff: I love that. I wanna go in two different places. I wanna in a moment, learn more about what you're seeing is changing and how people consume decision makers consume thought leadership and producing thought leadership with AI. I wanna go with it. Before you, Jake, you just build out we also have these five levers.
Right? So we have quality, reach, uniqueness, and then I think you're starting to allude to this independence premium and trust. Could you just unpack the other two for those other two for us?
Cindy Anderson: Yeah. The independence premium really comes when the production of the thought leadership is independent from the commercial aspects of the enterprise. So from the product marketing, from the, you know, sales arm, and it's really around using thought leadership to build the brand versus an affinity for a particular product or service. So that's the yep. That's kind of the independence piece.
The trust piece in Quality uniqueness and reach are really in the control of the thought leadership producer. You can pull lots of levers to improve your quality uniqueness or reach. Independence and trust, you can influence, but it's really determined by the consumer of the thought leadership, by the users of the thought leadership. So that's why we say, you know, you really need to be independent. Stay at arm's length.
You know, stay away from product pitches. Stay away from you know, specific sort of sales efforts within the thought leadership. And then the trust piece is it comes from kind of a combination of all of those other things, which is if you're producing quality, if you're producing independence. If you're producing, you know, thought leadership that's reaching into the market in the right way, then over time, you build that trust with your audience, and you do end up in one of those top five slots for trusted thought leadership. And there's a purchase premium there as well.
Kaihan Krippendorff: How long does it take to get there in the five? I'm sure the answer varies.
Cindy Anderson: Yeah. I think it does vary. And that's something we've talked about studying for the next book. But we'd yeah. We didn't ask that question.
Those of us who have been, you know, in the field for a while will tell you that it really takes consistency over time. If, you know, if you're in a new market, probably is faster. If you're in a mature market, like, you know, somebody like an IBM or McKinsey. And McKinsey's been doing thought leadership. They've met their McKinsey quarterly for sixty years this year, you know. So they've been doing it for a really long time, and it works. And that's why they keep doing it. So
Kaihan Krippendorff: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And a lot of their content comes also from their work too. There's, you know, outputs of their studies with clients, so they do also have kind of a proprietary source of data as well.
How are people consuming thought leadership differently today than, I don't know, twenty years ago, thirty years ago. I'm imagining it's maybe is long form going away? Is reading going away? Is it more fragmented?
Cindy Anderson: Well, it's interesting. Because we hear a lot that long form is going away, that prints going away, and in particular, that PowerPoint is dead. Right? None of those things are true based on the research that we've done. In fact, PowerPoint is up in the top three of preferred methods of getting thought leadership insights among executives.
Yeah. And we speculate. We didn't dig into it in this set of surveys, but because we saw this so strongly, it's something that we'll definitely look at in the next round. We speculate that it's because much of the thought leadership that is delivered is delivered through events and presentations at events. So our thought is that people are really used to PowerPoint.
They're comfortable with slides. They're comfortable consuming information, that's on a slide. Even if it's, you know, one of those, like, where we call them I charts that are, you know, really heavy content on slides, executives in our surveys seem to really value that as a way to get information that they need to help them make those smarter business decisions. Books are also not going away. Print content.
And in fact, the IBM Institute of Business Value, we actually produced over the last couple of years a set of three kind of coffee table books that identify the three main technologies that organizations are gonna have to get really good at in the next several years, Quantum, AI, and hybrid cloud. And we have that set, and our executive team uses it with our senior clients to really position IBM in a way that other organizations don't because people aren't really using print much anymore. So it's a differentiating feature, and I think that's probably why it came out pretty strongly in the research. Now, don't get me wrong. People love podcasts.
People love video. They like, you know, short form kind of data visualizations. But when it comes to trusted information that's based on data that's really gonna help an executive make a decision, they need to have something behind it. They need to feel like it's credible and authoritative. And that means that it's gotta be more than, you know, just a ninety second video.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. Got it. Yeah. Makes sense that there's the heightened the reality, I guess, and this is a good measure. And I could see that more safe just call them traditional forms of content delivery being more credible.
Then that let that let's say the consumption side. Now let's go to the supply side. You have a great chapter the great title, why generative AI can't produce thought leadership, and why it shouldn't even if it could. Talk to us about how AI is being used and should be used if at all.
Cindy Anderson: Yeah. So we just actually had a symposium of the global thought leadership in two, which is a brand new organization that represents thought leadership producers. And we had there was a lot of conversation around generative AI. It's moving so fast that it's really hard to research. We've done a couple of studies on it.
And the data comes back sort of all over the place. The one thing that we did find in the second round of data that informed the book was that executives, when we first surveyed, they said they were spending about two hours consuming thought leadership. Now they're spending three hours. So that's a pretty massive increase in the sort in the space of about eighteen months. Yeah.
And some of it, we think, has to do with generative AI because they're really looking for that credible, trusted, authoritative information that they can't seem to get through these sort of generative AI kind of generated content reports. So we think they're spending a lot more time really kind of sifting through the things that they really wanna see. What we also saw was that there's variable responses to is it more or less trustworthy? Is it more or less does it feel more or less independent? Does it feel so we kind of looked at all of the parameters?
So there's a lot more to unpack around generative AI. But what we did do when we were writing the book was we asked AI quite a lot of questions about thought leadership. And a lot of people think of generative AI as just kind of enhanced Google search, and it's really different than that, though it's becoming much more kind of retrievable generated like a search. But it can still only produce content from what it's been trained on for the time being. And if it's been trained on content that's already been produced and data that's already been analyzed, That means that what it produces is only gonna be a rehash of something that's already been done in in the book we call that thought followership, not thought leadership.
So that's really why we say And Jenny, I will tell you that it can't produce that leadership. In fact, that was one of the questions that we asked it. And why we say it shouldn't even if it could it’s because there's that follower aspect that I mean, nobody needs more content that's already been rehashed over and over. Right? We need a new insight.
We need to a new way to look at something. We need a different kind of approach to a thorny business problem. There aren't a lot of, you know, new business problems, people process technology. They're pretty much all the same, but we need a new way to look at them. And you really can't get that yet through Gen AI.
Will you ever, maybe, but we're not there yet.
Kaihan Krippendorff: And we have so many places we could go with that. I find generative AI to be really helpful when I'm producing a new piece of content. It'll take me, say, two, three, four weeks as I'm developing an idea, and I'm just having converse it helps me think. Like, Antonio Nieto, he in the podcast, he talked about that 70% of what a company does historically has been operational. And that as we automate, that'll go down to 70 30.
And so the 70% of projects will become 70% of projects and how that will change things. And so I've been really thinking about that, but I do just on the train or just I just talked to Gen AI and say, does this make sense? And what does it remind you of? And what other shifts in history? And I find it to be a great thought partner.
Cindy Anderson: And it has it can access a lot more experiences than a human. Yeah. Right? So that's likely why people and I heard a lot of people who do what you do. In fact, many of the folks on our team do that as well.
Because there's just a lot more in its memory banks than what a human would have in its memory. So you can get a broader, you know, kind of a broader sense of what do you think about that. Right? So that's where I think it's really kinda helpful. But we still we my team looks at the time it takes them to do certain things, like, typically, a, you know, a social media post or a blog or something like that.
And so far, based on how long it takes to input the prompt, get the feedback back, and then edit the feedback from the AI tool, the team is still faster. My team of experts is still faster. Now that once the prompt goes in and the return of the initial content, happens in seconds. Right? So that's what people tend to focus on, but it takes a really long time to write a good prompt.
You get the good prompt in there, you get feedback from the tool, and you still have to go in and do some significant editing. Because, again, you're getting kind of watered down information that's based on its, you know, full set of memory. So it's useful, but it's not it's still not as good as a really good, you know, experienced editor who can think on their feet.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. I agree. Agree. But as you said at the very beginning, we have we wanna think about it's not just information retrieval, and it's not write me a 500 word piece on some
Cindy Anderson: That. It can do that. But it's not gonna be something different. It'll be It'll sound very familiar.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Right. Yes. Yeah. And I think people could recognize that that improves. Yeah.
And so many things I wanna cover up, but we're reaching the top of our time with you. There are two kind of big ones and one more. Just talk to us a little bit about the portfolio. You talk about timely content, technical content, and timeless content. Just unpack that for a little bit for us.
How should a strategist thinking about how thought leadership is an integral part of the value of their company think about the portfolio of thought leadership content.
Cindy Anderson: Yeah. So we do break types of content down into three categories, timely, technical, and timeless. And the reason that we do that is because I mentioned earlier that thought leadership is a long term strategy. It's not something that you should take on or invest in if you wanna produce one report one time and, you know, kinda wait for the results to roll in. And if that's the case, then you need a portfolio of content.
Now we highly recommend that every organization have something that they're known for. So that anchor sort of piece of content or study, you know, that is owned. So if you think of, like, the edelman trust barometer, that's what we're talking about. Some kind of anchor piece of content that is meaningful to that organization in whatever their arena is that they can own in a way that their competitors can't at when I was at PMI, the project management institute, we had, you know, the high cost of low performance. And nobody else could really talk about that the way that a group of project managers who had experienced project failures could.
So those are the kinds of anchor pieces of content that we're talking about, and they're really they're really timeless because they're related to a topic that is going to VEX business leaders, you know, for a long time. So once you have that time list sort of anchor piece of content, then you can expand into more timely and technical pieces of content, where a timely piece might be something that you build off your anchor piece, but it's related to something that's happening in the world. So back to the adult man trust barometer, like, what's happening with, you know, global governments? How is that affecting? Trust in the world.
What's happening, you know, with last year, we had something like 74 countries had elections in the year and how did that impact, you know, trust. So those kinds of things can prompt a new way of looking at the topic that's still related to that anchor, timeless piece of content. And then the technical content is really more around in in we don't mean technical, like, computer tech or anything like that. Although it could be, it's really more around sort of a deep dive into one specific aspect. So maybe you talk about government trust.
Maybe you talk about, you know, business trust. So the technical content is, what does it mean for that particular kind of pillar of the anchor piece of content? So that's how you sort of begin to structure a content portfolio for thought leadership is start by thinking about what that one piece of content, that one topic that your organization can own, invest in the research, do the work, build that franchise, and then you can expand into your, you know, timely and technical content from there.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Got it. Okay. Yeah. So it's naturally like a sequencing, and then the yeah. The portfolio mix, I guess, evolves.
Love it. We talked about Antonio Nieto who's been on this podcast. We've had Scott Anthony on this podcast. We've lived in Singapore for a long time at, you know, site. Martin Reeves, who is formally the Henderson head of Henderson Institute at Deloitte.
So here, you have three thought leaders that have a branded name themselves as an individual, and they're creating content for the organization. So how do you think about who the voice should be, the individual or the company, and what are the pros and cons of the two?
Cindy Anderson: I think they play nicely together. So thought being a thought leader and producing thought leadership aren't the same thing, but they're very related. Right? So if you think about Antonio, for example, he's a thought leader in project management. He also produces thought leadership on his own.
And, frankly, when he was at PMI, we produced thought leadership that he was part of. So it's a bit of a kind of virtuous cycle in that regard. Producing thought leadership. The other example I would give is Mackenzie. Right?
They have we mentioned that they do some bench research. They work with their clients on producing content. They have their partners are subject matter experts and they're producing the thought leadership, they're also thought leaders in their field. So, again, it's kind of this virtuous cycle of somebody who knows a lot about a topic, paired with research that brings an outside perspective in. Can produce a really compelling piece of thought leadership that then can be used by that thought leader to advance the topic, right, to help solve a business problem.
So that's the way that if you have thought leaders or if you are a thought leader, you would use thought leadership to build your own brand. Within organizations like IBM, you know, Accenture, other organizations, it's more about the brand and building a trusted brand that can be you know, accessed by other people through the thought leadership. And that happens also with smaller organizations. You know, PMI did a lot of its work that way, building the awareness and the expertise of the project management institute in the field of understanding strategy implementation and project failure and things like that. So it can happen either way.
It can and probably in the most successful cases, there is an element of producing thought leadership and building a thought leader at the same time.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Great. Well, thank you so much. I love the book. Each of the chapters honestly, when I first cracked it open, I thought it was gonna be a lot of prose. And each chapter has structure.
There are three things. There are five things. There are eight things. It's very practical. So much in here, and I wish we had more time to dig into it more.
But what would you therefore leave us with? What should be the thing that a listener here? Should be walking away with from listening to this conversation.
Cindy Anderson: Kai and I would leave you and the listeners with this. Thought leadership is so valuable. The return on investment is a 56% based on our data, which is 16 times higher than a typical marketing campaign. The magnitude of that return indicates that thought leadership really has earned its place as the platform on which every other type of marketing should be built for an organization that wants to create a strong brand to build client loyalty. There just isn't any other choice based on the magnitude of the return that we've seen in our data.
Kaihan Krippendorff: Amazing. Well, Cindy, thank you for doing that research for uncovering that proprietary data that changes the way that we think about thought leadership and making it actionable for everyone that is listening and will certainly be buying your book, the ROI of thought leadership. Thank you for being here.
Cindy Anderson: Thanks, Kaihan. It was great to talk to you.
