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.
Some people like to say that marketing is just psychology. It’s glib and snarky enough to sound smart. It’s not quite right, but it’s not quite wrong either. But it also opens the door to a question that puzzles me. Why do so many content marketers seem to operate without a “theory of mind”?
Theory of Mind: A Basic Definition
Let’s take a moment to break down a meaningful definition of story and clarify what doesn’t meet tTheory of mind is a core concept in cognitive and developmental science. Having a theory of mind means people can attribute mental states to themselves and to others. As people mature, it also means understanding that others have mental states that are different from one’s own. Mental states include beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, and knowledge.
While it historically only applied to human cognition, many animal behavior researchers are now finding evidence of it in chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans, as well as in dogs, dolphins, crows, parrots, and octopuses.
The Absence of Theory of Mind in Content World
My tangent about animals might be more interesting than my main topic, content marketing. But here we go…
I see scant evidence in the content-industrial complex that content creators grasp the concept that people (called “targets”) have their own thoughts, beliefs, desires, and emotions. They struggle with other core elements of theory of mind, too, such as recognizing that others may have different information or experiences that shape their perspective, realizing that others’ beliefs may be or seem incorrect, or that intentions lie behind behavior.
Theory of Mind in B2B Buying
While it’s hard to concoct a generic theory of mind for a specific audience, such as executive decision makers in institutional finance, a few broad principles apply.
- Executive decision-makers have to balance risk, reward, credibility, and long-term organizational impact in the decisions they make.
- These considerations generate a wide range of mental states, some triggering the search for rational, defensible input to their decisions and some circulating through accurate and erroneous beliefs about political, reputational, and organizational dynamics.
- Emotional states such as fear of failure, desire for status and recognition, and other forms of anxiety, trust, and prestige also come into play.
The effects of those mental states compound themselves because B2B decisions rarely involve just one individual. They require buy-in from multiple stakeholders from board members to peers to less senior managers and line employees. When a financial institution puts the safety or manageability of billions of dollars in assets at stake, those mental states become more intense.
Mind the Gap
Despite that complex of fluctuating mental states, content marketers proceed as if the only thing that matters is content consumption. Engagement data measures anything but the kind of intersubjective engagement it takes to connect with people under pressure at that intensity or scale.
Content written purely to capture a lead, pepper targets with messaging that exacerbates concerns or amplifies buzzwords and details implies that content producers have little to no theory of mind.
Apply Theory of Mind to Decision Making
But if you’re not operating with a theory of mind, how do you, as an otherwise cognitively mature adult, get one? You can begin by prioritizing deep relevance, empathy, and impact. Doing so forces you to listen actively to what senior decision makers are saying and doing via interviews, surveys, and data. It also compels you to develop preemptive empathy.
Preemptive empathy means two things.
First, consider those unspoken questions swirling around in a decision maker’s mind and answer them in ways that are rational, emotional, and trust-building.
Second, recognize that messaging and marketing assets alter a decision maker’s mental states. That’s where theory of mind comes in. It’s anticipatory.
Content-spew may interrupt attention, but it also disrupts. If you only care about whether people open, view, or superficially react to it by clicking an icon, you’re not employing theory of mind. But with a robust theory of mind, you can create well-crafted, empathetic messages and assets that alter thoughts, beliefs, desires, and emotions. You imagine not just what they do with your marketing, but what it does to them, and what the second- and third-order consequences of those impacts might be.
Why Theory of Mind Is Needed to Influence High-Stakes Decisions
In my experience with financial institutions and institutional product and service providers, thought leadership strongly embodies a theory of mind approach. It is so superior in its relevance to cognitive and behavioral factors that I don’t even believe it can be called content. Leave that word for the stuff with no theory and little mind behind it rather than taking both thinking and leading seriously—both of which depend on theory of mind to happen.
Thought Leadership Puts Theory of Mind Into Practice
Thought leadership evidences theory of mind because it creates a connection and impact that continue reverberating into further effects on the decision making process. It assumes that the relationship with an audience should be dynamic and is created in a way that makes the most of that dynamic potential. Here’s why:
- Thought leadership identifies the challenges, questions, or fears decision-makers are already confronting and provides input that changes how decision makers see those factors.
- Thought leadership establishes trust by providing actionable insights and strategic guidance. It gives its audience something to understand and then go do in a way that builds upon clarity and confidence.
- Thought leadership influences decision-makers’ mental models by addressing the broader context they care about—market trends, regulatory changes, or operational risks.
- Thought leadership uses expertise, deep research, and practical strategies to address the rational dimensions of decision-making while simultaneously counteracting fears and anxieties and magnifying the reader’s desire for status and prestige.
- Thought leadership starts and continues your company’s conversations with potential buyers facing high-stakes decisions. Sometimes, you will be part of those conversations. Other times, they will equip people with compelling insights and arguments they can use amongst themselves to advocate for change.
All of those outcomes depend on having a robust, sophisticated, and preemptively empathetic theory of mind that undergirds individual pieces of thought leadership as well as the broader thought leadership strategy they express.
The Next Time You Consume Some Content…
Admittedly, this issue of my newsletter has been a bit theoretical in its own right, but if you’ve made it this far, let me end with a simple request that will make my point as clear as possible.
The next time you “consume some marketing content” (as if that could ever be a legitimate human intent), use theory of mind to ask yourself what theory of mind that content creator could have had in creating whatever content you’ve ended up consuming. What could that creator possibly be thinking of you, about you, as evidenced by their getting that content in front of you? To what extent do they even seem to acknowledge your various mental states, such as beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, and knowledge, let alone have a positive impact on them?
More often than not, you’ll find little reason to believe that content came from any viable theory of mind at all.
Three Grace Notes
“What then do we see when we look at this bustling public world?
Among the most complicated and interesting of the phenomena are
the doings of our fellow human beings. If we try to predict and
describe them using the same methods and concepts we have devel-
oped to describe landslides, germination, and magnetism, we can
make a few important inroads, but the bulk of their observable macro-activity—their ‘behavior—is hopelessly unpredictable from these perspectives. People are even less predictable than the weather.” —Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance
“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
“The interdependence of belief and meaning springs from the interdependence of two aspects of the interpretation of speech behavior: the attribution of beliefs and the interpretation of sentences.” —Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation
Note: The links above are affiliate links. I’m using them in lieu of paid subscription tiers or digital tip jars. Seems like a much more graceful way to generate financial support while sharing more thinking and writing that can guide thought leadership.
