Does Thought Leadership Marketing = Competitive Suicide?
“Won’t this content that we’re publishing be giving away too much to our competitors?” or “Our customers are going to take this great information that we’re publishing and use it to shop our competitors.” Are two very common objections that I often hear when introducing an organization to Thought Leadership Marketing. They are both logical concerns, I agree, but there are a few reasons why thought leadership Marketing is NOT just giving away information to your customers and competitors to use against you. Let’s explore:
Thought leadership is based on your organizational competence: Thought leadership marketing is based on nearly equal parts organizational competence and customer & industry depth of understanding. If your organization’s competence is truly differentiated (and if it isn’t , why are you still in business?) and you have the deep, nuanced understanding of your customers and markets that your thought leading content claims that you do, then your competitors are virtually eliminated from view in the eyes of the customer who seeks your unique competence. The marginal value of directly copying a competitor’s thought leadership position, and thus usurping their competence and plagiarizing their work in understanding customers and markets is antithetical to a sound strategy and an easily defensible position from the thought leader’s perch.
Thought leadership and customer education inspires trust: So what, who cares about trust and why teach my customers any more than they need to know? Actually, trust is one of the most coveted of all aspects in a supplier-customer relationship and is becoming an increasingly important element in the value proposition that customer derive from their supplier relationships. A recent study published in the MIT Sloan Management Review illustrates the long term value to educating customers through thought leadership content in the financial services industry. Customers that are made knowledgeable through the efforts of the organization exhibit higher loyalty scores, place greater value on the organizations’ complete suite of services and ultimately value the shared wisdom of the supplier as part of the overall value equation.
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Related posts:
- Thought Leadership Marketing: Attaining vs. Claiming
- Newest version of the Thought Leadership Marketing Frameworks map
- Webinar Replay: Thought Leadership Marketing for CEOs
- The Thought Leadership Marketing Equation
- What’s your TLMQ? (Thought Leadership Marketing Quotient)
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