WHY SLTLA?

Thought Leadership Marketing

Most Thought Leadership Marketing is currently undertaken via one of two routes – either ad hoc, with various (usually) external writers hired without an overarching Strategy, or else, with large firms, subcontracted out to an equally large corporate agency. In the former case, there are often quality issues and, equally important, relevance issues.

With the latter, the quality is solid, but materials can feel rather generic, with one company’s White Paper, say, on a particular subject fairly indistinguishable from another beyond the externals of Branding. Many of these reports, too, though they may contain proprietary research which is of course very useful to readers (some are very good, indeed I consult them myself), are still not ideas-driven, nor do they tend to capture the unique 'voice' of the CEO or even the Company itself. As such their Conclusions are often little different to those of the competition and they may not be especially memorable. Nonetheless all this is well and good if all you are trying to achieve is to maintain levels of content output.

I tend to work with the CEOs / Directors of medium-to-larger SME's who are very much the Figurehead and usually also the Founder of their Company. Very often, these are extremely interesting people with unique insights, quirky and passionate views on relevant subjects, often witty and with a distinct opinion and ‘voice’, and often though not always interested in changing society for the better via their business. The companies they lead or have built tend to do things differently (although this may not have been formally articulated). They also tend to enjoy the process of creating Thought Leadership and actively want to spend time talking through ideas. In turn, I help capture both their ‘voice’ and original thinking.

Hence SLTLA is Voice-Driven and Ideas-Driven. I work with Leaders of Companies large enough to want to do things coherently but still small enough to want to avoid a corporate style and to want to be hands-on. Ultimately though SLTLA is interested in working with companies for whom the bottom line is not, in fact, the bottom line. You have something important to say: I want to help you articulate and get it out there.

In addition, unlike many agencies, I don’t see Thought Leadership marketing as separate from either conventional ideas-driven PR (e.g. features published in industry journals), nor from conventionally published books – indeed all these aspects can work together as parts of a coherent Strategy which includes digital.

Thought Leadership, Knowledge Management & USPs

The way most companies are structured and therefore go about commissioning Thought Leadership also unwittingly creates massive disconnect between the Thought Leader and the end material. Take a look below at just how far removed the CEO’s / Key Director’s actual insights, thinking and ‘voice’ are from the final Thought Leadership materials. This is occasionally different where a ghostwriter is hired for a full-length book and works directly with the CEO; however this ghostwriter is usually also completely disconnected from the writers of all other materials. As such there is no coherent voice, no Strategy and no Core Concept (see my Core Concept Package). We then wonder why all these endeavours may fail to make a clear connection in the minds of readers (i.e. potential Clients) between a given company and a given stance / idea.

SLTLA offers a far more elegant solution which ensures a direct connection between yourself as Thought Leader and the end material, as well as complete coherency in Voice and Concepts.

Finally, as an added benefit, because I am skilled at drawing out of my Clients ideas that they may not have fully articulated previously, this can (almost inadvertently) lead to new ways of ‘selling’ the company’s services - even potentially to formulating completely new Service Offers.

Mail

email me at susan@susan-lawson.co.uk for a complimentary 30 min discussion

The way most companies are structured and go about commissioning Thought Leadership creates massive disconnect / is scattered and huge amounts of Tacit Knowledge are also leaking out of the company on a daily basis.

Look below at both the way knowledge remains ‘trapped’ in the minds of both the CEO but also individual professions (engineers, say) without ever being articulated. Then look at how Marketing Activities are normally structured and Thought Leadership ‘deliverables’ commissioned - and look how far away the CEO / Key Director is from the person or people who (eventually) write the Thought Leadership that is supposed to reflect the Company’s Finest Thinking!

When you work with me it looks instead like this:

What do I mean by the CEO and / or Company Core Concept?

In my experience, most companies have at least one unique way of doing things that they, themselves, haven’t perceived as a Selling Point or unique message in any overtly articulated way. As such, they sometimes struggle to say something original in Thought Leadership when the originality of the company is staring them in the face.

The best example I can give of this, because I’ve come across it twice in different ways, is where companies were sitting on highly unique approaches to sustainability which they never recognised as such because it had never been articulated or written down. They didn’t need to ‘invent’ a stance on ESG because they already had a very unique approach to it – but without an external eye who is also a wordsmith – this would have been lost and their ESG materials would have wound up as yet more generic greenwash disconnected from anything the Company actually did.

Similarly, many CEOs (or Key directors, or Fund Managers) are highly original thinkers but are not necessarily writers or wordsmiths and so, again, beyond conversations with the Head of R&D, many original insights remain trapped within the mind of the CEO! I have a particular way of teasing out these insights as well as hitting on the especial way in which individual Business Leaders frame their thinking, the words they use, the metaphors they choose and so on.

All of these hidden Insights are Gold Dust for Thought Leadership. How much dry Thought Leadership have you read, for example, on ESG? Doesn’t it almost always read the same? Doesn’t it almost always conclude the same things? And even where Reports have Unusual Conclusions, don’t they almost always read the same and use the same generic Corporate Style that makes one company’s Report almost interchangeable from another. Where are the original angles?

So ‘Core Concept’ is about teasing out that Fundamental Idea, Concept, Metaphor or Way or Unique w Modus Operandi that ought to lie at the very heart of all that company’s Thought Leadership endeavours (or at the heart of the CEO’s book). (Of course there can be more than one Core Concept in different areas – for example a Company might have a Core Concept in relation to Sustainability and another Core Concept in relation to, say, ********* - but ideally these all still tend to boil down to one Key Thing that makes them different.

How is this different to a USP, I hear you ask? A USP is about the Service or Products or Way of Doing business. And whilst these are connected, Core Concept is rather more like a Unique Thought or Unique Concept or Unique Worldview. It comes closer to an Ethos, I suppose – although one that can be elaborated engagingly and usefully in Long Form materials. As such its different than a Vision statement or a Strapline because its deeper.

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