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.
Whispering in a crowded train station won’t do much to help you get your message heard.
But any thought leadership strategies seem to ignore such basic common sense. They pursue overly broad topics where everyone has a point of view, such as blockchain or AI, and prioritize overcrowded channels to the exclusion of all else, such as earned media or LinkedIn.
Sadly, these approaches provide only an opportunity to say very little while many others are also communicating at the same time and in the same place. As a result, they fail to go deeper and tell the story that only they can tell, to tell it in full, or to direct it intentionally to the right audiences.
Getting Beyond Generic in Institutional Finance
Instead of generic blockchain or AI discussions, for example, an institutional bank could explore the tokenization of private credit or the role of AI in alternative asset due diligence. These are more precise and offer a differentiated voice. Or an investment manager could lead the conversation on how AI-powered portfolio optimization is transforming liability-driven investing (LDI).
Seeking Blue Oceans
A business strategy classic helps explain this phenomenon: Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy. While blue ocean thinking focuses on product strategy, the parallels to thought leadership can be instructive.
In simplest terms, a red ocean is a crowded, well-known market where products are commodities. The blood of competitors clouds the waters in a feeding frenzy. A blue ocean is the wider, deeper, unexplored market space created through category innovation. When OpenAI released ChatGPT, for example, they didn’t merely create a new search engine. They redefined how people access and use information.
Seven Strategic Pillars
A blue ocean thought leadership strategy will focus on seven pillars.
Creating uncontested share of mind:
You don’t have to be present in the topics everyone else is discussing, at least not from a thought leadership perspective. Offering clients and prospects an educational piece on a particular trend (again, such as blockchain or AI) can have instructional value when it comes from you as a trusted voice. Still, it does not serve the purpose of establishing a thought-leading position.
So, instead, you can create uncontested share of mind by creating an entirely new topic or by providing a substantially new way of looking at an existing topic. Instead of publishing a fintech report on lending trends, a company could launch a liquidity index for private market transactions, much like Preqin or PitchBook dominate data-driven insights. New ideas and data, a new voice, or a surprisingly new angle can move you to much clearer space.
Making competitor voices irrelevant:
Let your competitors be relevant in the areas that best and most specifically differentiate them. Do the same yourself. That’s where you will find your blue ocean thought leadership.
You can best understand your blue ocean through careful analysis of your competitors’ and other thought leaders’ strategies. What can you infer about their strategy? What are they saying and how?
You might look across firms to assess how private equity, asset managers, or fintechs discuss industry shifts. It also helps to be specific. Many firms discuss direct lending broadly, for example, but few analyze how direct lending funds can enhance bank capital efficiency post-Basel III endgame.
Use this analysis as input to do something differently that aligns with your commercial goals while standing out in a unique voice.
Creating and capturing new attention:
When people follow a specific topic or innovation area, they already have many sources of information. In parallel, they are likely following many other topics. Their attention is crowded. A passing quote can create some awareness, but honestly ask yourself: how many times have you read an expert quote in a media source or blog and then actually taken steps to research that expert thinking in more depth?
Not to discount the possible cumulative impact of seeing such quotes repeatedly, but when you deploy blue ocean thought leadership, you create a destination for the “then what?” Frequent publication and interaction, even to the level of publishing your own branded journalism, creates new spaces of attention.
Creating full-cycle attention opportunities:
Multiple studies have found an average of over six PR pros per journalist in the U.S., making earned media the reddest of red oceans for communicators. More broadly, each communication channel suffers from several disadvantages and offers its own specific crowded market constraints. But the good news is that they tend to compensate for each other.
Using owned media, such as your online presences, compensates for the shallowness and speed of social media and the inherent forgettability of almost all earned traditional media. Conferences and speaking opportunities offset the one-way assets of your owned media. By mixing these channels in your own way, with the thought leadership that you create and publish as the wind in your sails, you head into bluer oceans.
Example: A firm specializing in structured finance could integrate earned, owned, and experiential media by publishing a proprietary index on private credit deal performance and using it as a touchpoint for LinkedIn engagement, roundtables, and a dedicated quarterly webinar.
Aligning communication efforts to the stories only you can tell:
This pillar of blue ocean thought leadership calls for a fair degree of introspection. Companies seeking a thought-leading position need to understand what justifies such a position in detail. How have you changed the product or service landscape in your industry? How exactly have your executives and top subject matter experts led?
These are tough questions to answer; they often benefit from an objective third-party view to draw clear lines between self-talk, justifiable aspiration, and legitimately stable leadership positions. The answers you find to them will become the source for stories and points of view grounded in your specific capabilities.
Prioritizing engagement over announcement:
There’s a difference between simply saying something and effecting change. Announcing a new product or service or a strategic senior hire can provide evidence for your industry leadership, but such announcements must sit underneath a broader strategy of thought leadership creation to work. They must be accompanied by more substantive assets and by direct engagement efforts to deliver ideas and messages to target audiences. You can’t be a disconnected “we” speaking to an indistinct “them.” You have to go “you to you” to win.
Think of the parallel to a political campaign. After a candidate announces a run, they get out into the world and have conversations. They engage with stakeholders in social channels. And they maintain a steady flow of messaging to connect their goal (an election win) to their audiences’ actions (such as supporting, donating, and voting). Being recognized as the leader in a particular domain requires the same level of engagement and campaigning.
In fintech, instead of announcing a new payment rail product, a provider could hold a series of live debates between CFOs and treasurers about the real-world impact of FedNow and RTP adoption in corporate liquidity management.
Driving industry transformation:
True thought leadership emphasizes the “leadership” dimension of the concept. Pieces that summarize recent trends do not meet that criterion. In the crowded space of points of view on reasonably well-known topics in your industry, you have to lay out a vision for how the knowledge and practices must evolve.
There are enormous opportunities to do this in institutional finance and capital markets, such as publishing a vision for how tokenized funds can reshape institutional real estate investment or democratize access to private markets. These examples expand beyond typical “blockchain for finance” discussions.
This vision, of course, should tie back to concrete practices within your organization so that you can demonstrate proof and believability. With that deep experiential authenticity, you stay within a blue ocean of what only you can describe. And you champion the advancement of your industry as a result.
The Choice
While none of these is an either-or choice, they do suggest vital parameters for creating and amplifying an authentic voice. Few thought leaders have the luxury of avoiding red oceans entirely, but those who dwell in them risk having their messages drowned out and forgotten.
So how red is your ocean? And how blue would you like it to be?
Three Grace Notes
“Yes, life, so-called, was a birthday party gone wild, with shouting and squabbling, and games he didn’t know the rules of, and one lot ganging up on the other, and knocking each other down and dancing in a ring like savages, the whole mad rampage going on in a haze of dust and noise and horrible, hot stinks.” —John Banville, The Drowned
“The individual who has been liberated by reason is always running head-on into a world, a society, whose past in the shape of ‘prejudices’ has a great deal of power; he is forced to learn that past reality is also a reality.” —Wolfram Eilenberger and Shaun Whiteside, The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times
“Do not all pure aspirations, every last one of them, stream from one and the same source? And just as spiritual streams rush to their source, all waters return to the sea.” —Eugene Vodolazkin, Laurus
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