Thought leadership should be fun, fast, and fearless. You tap into excitement about new ideas and advocate for something better. That’s the mindset behind The Idea Sled. Projects glide forward gracefully. It’s the momentum of commitment. This newsletter shows you how.
Marketers will often ask me a seemingly simple question. “How do we know if this piece of thought leadership is good or not?”
What’s The Right Quality Metric?
On the one hand, the answer seems entirely subjective. Marketers have the usual complement of engagement metrics like open rates, clicks, qualified leads, and other data. Yet that data only measures itself. It ultimately has no bearing on the underlying quality of specific thought leadership.
Sometimes, without looking at the metrics, marketers rely on anecdotal feedback instead. Did the authors and contributors end up happy with the results? Did they share any inspiring stories about recipients praising what they read?
Anecdotal Feedback
Those anecdotes can be more powerful than they seem if they refer to the intended audience for a piece, but they also tend to feel a bit amorphous. How do you report them to leadership, especially when leaders want hard numbers to indicate results?
One vital element often goes missing in the evaluation of thought leadership quality, however. Sometimes, I’ll be a bit glib about it. It’s thought leadership, right? So, does it contain any new thinking? Does it lead any intended audience forward to think differently about industry trends and high-stakes decisions?
The answers to these questions mean more than it might seem, but it’s also possible to dig deeper into the intrinsic qualities of thought leadership. I don’t mean distribution metrics. I mean explicitly evaluating the impact of thinking and leading.
In the context of thought leadership on institutional finance topics, several factors characterize the quality of produced assets.
The Five Levels of Thought Leadership
For all of these factors, there’s a hierarchy. It can even be used to score the content.
Level 1: Does it explain an existing state of affairs or situation? Explanatory content can have a lot of value, but it sits at the bottom of the thought leadership hierarchy.
Level 2: Does it combine input from multiple sources to form a new point of view? While that point of view may not be entirely original, bringing together data, trends, and insights in new ways can shed new light on old topics. It helps readers begin to see something they know through a new perspective.
Level 3: Does it formulate a vision of how things could or should be, combining new insights or higher-level analysis? Thought leadership that draws out unexpected insights or offers new solutions to long-standing, well-known problems begin to shift what readers see and how they see it. It starts to create new zones of possibility.
Level 4: Does it take any risks? While not everyone will agree with a controversial take on a particular topic, riskier thought leadership elevates the conversation. Since the goal of thought leadership is often to start conversations with decision makers who may also ultimately be buyers or with influencers who can foster industry change, risks help definitively cross the line between mere opinion and thought leadership.
Level 5: At the final level, does the thought leadership include proprietary data or insights that no one else could replicate? These elements may come from primary research or from data that data providers can’t or don’t offer. They might also come from specific implementations or work done with clients. They anchor thought leadership by demonstrating how intriguing underlying ideas play out in reality.
The Specifics of Institutional Finance
Theoretically, these five levels of thought leadership could apply to any industry. Higher levels equate to better quality. But in institutional finance, there are also topical criteria to consider. Thought leadership needs to cover a combination of aspects of an institutional context.
It can be difficult to be comprehensive in a way that applies to every institutional scenario. Still, there is a short list of questions that should be answered, in combination, and with the majority addressed at least at Level 3 in the hierarchy above.
- What happens in the lifecycle of the relevant asset class?
- What are the needs and interests of core counterparties within asset class activity?
- What are the core workflows associated with a trade or a transaction?
- What are the supporting operational workflows that ensure transactions occur safely and reliably?
- What are the needs and challenges of service providers who facilitate the movement of assets among issuers, managers, and owners/end investors?
- What are the enabling and inhibiting impacts of existing financial technology?
- What is the role of regulation in the overall ecosystem for the asset class?
Combinatorial Effects
In theory, a piece of thought leadership could go deep on just one of these questions. A Level 5 perspective on a single question could significantly reframe readers’ understanding. The risk is that overly narrow specialization becomes an academic analysis rather than thought leadership. And therefore, it is too specific to change how decision makers think.
In practice, however, the questions themselves are closely interconnected. It’s hard to talk about just one without having at least some higher-level analyses of others. You might want to pursue a couple of interrelated questions at Level 5 and weave in some Level 3 and 4 insights on the main contributing factors.
Back to Metrics
Coming back to the question of measuring intrinsic quality, these levels and questions can be used as a simple scoring mechanism. If you assign one to five points based on levels to each of the core questions institutional finance thought leadership should answer, you can start to create numerical scores.
In this model, the maximum would be 35. But 35 is still just a number. The next level of scoring would need to align with a thought leader’s business priorities. For example, an institutional fintech might overweight the relative importance of question six, a regulatory consultancy of question 7, etc.
The basic scoring method is relevant even without customization, but each company should tailor it to their strategic priorities, their goals for changing how essential audiences think, and the ultimate buying decisions their thought leadership intends to inflect.
Three Grace Notes
“‘The past shapes the present’—they teach people that in schools and universities. Shapes? Infiltrates more like, imbues, infuses, it is invisible this past, it is gas not solid, an odourless, colourless chemical agent bouncing around in the lungs, crackling in the spaces between us, in the air the culture breathes in, out.” —Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic
“In the same vein, it is unnecessary for someone with a wealth of knowledge to drag out a fuzzy, dubious container like the novel for his purposes. No need for him to set up an imaginary time and place from scratch. All he has to do is rationally organize and then put into words the information he has on hand to wow his audience.” —Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation
“Learning something new, of your own choosing, on your own time, for your own reasons is a surprisingly potent antidote to languishing.” —Corey Keyes, Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down
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