Good thought leadership creates powerful engagement because it acknowledges people’s lived experience with trends and challenges. It makes sense within their life-world.
For example, imagine you are developing an innovative tool or approach for a complex investment instrument. You need to understand the whole ecosystem of stakeholders, not just the features and benefits of your offering if you want your thought leadership to resonate.
Excellent thought leadership goes one step further by helping people improve their life-world, helping them understand more and make better decisions. In the above scenario, you can imagine changing the way people perceive the complexity of their specific ecological niche and how to thrive within it.
That is the exact reason why thought leadership stumbles when it collides typical content marketing approaches.
Too much marketing is still based on a naive view of human psychology. Stimulus, response. Call to action, result.
It’s never that simple when you recognize people as living and participating in multiple life-worlds. You can’t just jab them with a stick and expect them to jump. You have to engage.
Thought leadership is all about that engagement. It’s especially in complex contexts such institutional finance, but it applies in many, many other industries, too.
