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.
Financial Thought Leadership as an Antidote to Conformity
Short-term tricks reflect status anxiety. Much of the thinking around “content” devolves into a form of contentism, a circus of performative content for content’s sake. It’s the circularity of content professionals talking to each other about content instead of prioritizing ideas. Defeating contentism takes courage to resist and heroism to defeat.
Contentism: The reduction of thought leadership to formulaic tactics—an endless cycle of articles, LinkedIn posts, and trend reports that serve no higher purpose than meeting marketing KPIs.
Contentism as a Hall of Mirrors
The problem in industries like institutional finance (investment management, institutional banking, or institutional fintech) is that contentism’s tired playbooks don’t build trust with billion-dollar decision-makers. It’s a hall of mirrors—looking at me looking at myself. Do I look good? How many views and likes did I get?
These mirrors of contentism shatter when it comes to complex ideas. When decision-makers look into them, they just see through them because there’s nothing there to look at. Thought leadership gets cut to ribbons because the content marketing playbook of following best practices, optimizing for engagement, tracking performance, iterating, repurposing, and repeating only serves itself.
How Contentism Plays Us
Marketing leaders face an unspoken pressure to avoid risk and conform. Content seems like something complicated and scary. So, it’s reassuring for them to listen to specialists who can handle content. And because content seems like powerful magic, the only way to control it is to play one’s part safely. Contentism is a great way to deliver imaginary numbers, too.
The ploy happens because CMOs are leaders, but at the same time, they are navigating a system of professional status and role anxiety, in an environment where other functional leaders often look at marketing with skepticism. It’s all too easy to be hijacked into wanting to appear competent and relevant without stepping outside accepted norms. Formulaic tactics provide a sense of status security, helping reassure marketers and executives that they are “doing content right.”
Thought Leaders, Break Free!
Legitimate and meaningful thought leadership is not an act of conformity, especially in an industry where trust, differentiation, and credibility drive billion-dollar decisions. To earn trust with sophisticated institutional audiences, thought leadership needs to be more like an act of heroism that thwarts and defeats the mindset of predictable, engagement-optimized playbooks.
In an industry where trusted innovation is the ultimate currency, cheap engagement tricks are a liability. The firms that win will be the ones that dare to lead. For CMOs in institutional finance, that means acting as a champion for thought leadership instead of conformity.
Doing so means:
- Pushing Against the Safe Playbook: Instead of following best practices unthinkingly, CMOs must ask tough questions. Does this serve our brand’s long-term credibility or just our immediate KPIs? If we commit to credibility, how do we follow through?
- Elevating Expert Voices: Thought leadership comes from thinkers and practitioners shaping investment and financial strategies rather than marketers optimizing headlines. The marketer’s role shifts from producing assets to finding and amplifying a company’s most thoughtful and insightful voices.
- Challenging Industry Orthodoxy: Thought leadership must introduce new ways of thinking, not just reinforce existing narratives. Marketers don’t need the same level of expertise as thought leaders, but they do need enough industry knowledge to ask tough questions and push thinking beyond conventional wisdom.
Contentism is Brand Corrosion
“The only time life grinds to a halt or explodes in anarchy and chaos is when a culture falls down on its job of constructing a meaningful hero-system for its members.” — Ernest Becker
Contentism isn’t just ineffective—it’s actively corrosive. The more firms rely on it, the more they damage their credibility, weaken their differentiation, and create a system where the smartest ideas never surface.
The damage starts in the market. Content for content’s sake weakens trust, authority, and influence. A trend report might gain traction, a LinkedIn post might drive clicks, a whitepaper might get downloads, but if it doesn’t say anything new, decision-makers stop paying attention. The content blends into the sea of sameness. Once audiences recognize the formula, they disengage.
Corrosion and Contagion
If thought leadership fails to introduce substantive ideas or take a stand, the corrosion spreads. Over time, executives and SMEs withdraw from the process. They see thought leadership as a distraction that dilutes their expertise rather than amplifies it. Without their buy-in, marketing teams default to even more formulaic content.
Contentism can even stifle innovation. When thought leadership is treated as a performance marketing exercise rather than a strategic discipline, ideas that could reshape industry conversations go unspoken, not because they lack merit but because they don’t fit neatly into a tactical playbook.
In marketing, this manifests industry-wide as a crisis of differentiation. When everyone conforms, no one stands out. Thought leadership stops leading. And when thought leadership stops leading, firms lose the ability to stand for anything at all.
From Contentism to Heroism
The failure of contentism isn’t just a failure of differentiation. Worse, it’s a failure of purpose. It rewards conformity, not leadership. Thought leadership, by contrast, is a heroic act in its willingness to break from safe, predictable narratives and put forth ideas that challenge, redefine, and elevate industry conversations.
It might be easier to blend in. But thought leadership, when practiced with purpose, is a different kind of narrative. I call it a heroic act because it demands taking the risk of saying something that challenges the industry’s assumptions, the risk of backing an idea before it becomes consensus, the risk of leading when it would be easier to blend in, and the risk of saying something that falls outside predictable, circular contentism.
When firms embrace this view of thought leadership, marketing is no longer a pointless content machine. It becomes a force that elevates the firm’s intellectual capital and extends its influence. The best CMOs recognize this and refuse to settle for the false status and role reinforcement of contentism. In an industry where trust is everything, heroism that pursues depth over volume, substance over performance metrics, and leadership over conformity is the only strategy that makes sense.
Three Grace Notes
“Each person will twist the world in some way to try to accord it with his [sic] fantasies, wishes, fears; he will fail in some way to see obvious things in the world because these obvious things are a threat to him; he will knuckle under to some kind of authority, some source of sustaining and transcending power which gives him the mandate for his life and nourishes his equanimity.” —Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning
“We voluntarily turn our lives and ourselves into an exhibition for the benefit of others. Our society craves for the shadowy appearances, not the reality behind them.” —Lee D. Clarke, Thirst : A Cultural Critique of Contemporary Society
“Whoever wants me now must hunt me down / Like something wild, and wild is anything / Beyond the reach of purpose not its own.” —Wendell Berry, This Day
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