Data Storytelling With High ROI: How to Create Great Thought Leadership with Cindy Anderson & Anthony Marshall, CMO and Senior Research Director at IBM

Cindy Anderson: And I really love the trends pieces. if I'm thinking about what's super wonderful, it's like, I really like this stuff that's forward looking and that uses data to sort of say, here's what we think we see coming down the pike. and what does that maybe mean for business?

Richie Cotton: Okay. Yeah, I think trends is always a popular topic. It's like once you know what's going to happen in the future. Very, very common desire. Now I would say about half the profiles on LinkedIn, like people claim to be a thought leader. I'm sure you've got strong opinions on this. What counts as thought leadership?

Cindy Anderson: I'll tell you how we define thought leadership. And in our book we define it really as quite simply distinctive, evidence based intelligence that gives leaders the insights they need to make better business decisions. And It gives them the inspiration to act. And that's really important because there are many, many people who confuse thought leadership with other types of marketing content.

But getting the definition right really matters because the research that we conducted to write our book shows that the best thought leadership has a measurable and material impact. On executives who consume it. So, it influences decision making. It drives sales. And in order to do that, it really needs to be bias free and based in that kind of data oriented, trusted independent kind of environment. 

And it's got to have actionable results, right? It's got to tell you what you can do as a result of the data that you're bringing forward. But when it's all of those things together, when it's distinctive, when it's evidence based, when it's actionable it's one of the best and most impactful relationship building investments that an organization can make.

I

Richie Cotton: that's very cool. So I like the idea that this is something that is, data driven and it's designed to help you make decisions. Some of our favorite topics on this show for sure. So it sounds like these are really just like very cool forms of data stories then. so, you mentioned McKinsey and other sort of organizations where creating reports is kind of their bread and butter.

Who else might want to create their own thought leadership?

Anthony Marshall: there's an organization, Source Global, that actually does ratings of thought leadership, identifies excellent thought leadership, and source has been doing this for something like 15 years or so. in their terms, they assess about, I don't know, 20, 25 organizations against four criteria.

One is differentiation. How different is, a piece of thought leadership appeal? Does it incent you to sort of read on? There's resilience in terms of how trustworthy. Does it have the proprietary data that you're talking about and prompting action? You know, how practical is it? But in those rankings, it is really the big consultancies, the big technology firms, but all sorts of organizations are and can produce thought leadership and I think Cindy and I are sort of seeing this groundswell of interest and around thought leadership and in the conversations that we're having real estate companies, architecture companies, law firms, engineering organization, staffing and talent organ, the list goes on and thought leadership based on sort of the definition that Cindy was putting forward, that is seen as being very valuable and, really as a determining factor of influencing Clients influencing customers.

Cindy Anderson: I would just add to that, Richie, that the organizations that are the most successful at producing thought leadership are the ones who really look at it as a long term investment. They look at it as a way to build loyalty, as a way to build their brand, as a way to really deepen their client relationships because Thought Leadership isn't a marketing campaign.

It's not an ad. It's very different approach to building your business and to building client loyalty and a really strong brand for the long term.

Richie Cotton: Okay, so I just sound like there can be some pretty strong benefits for anyone who, like, if you need to influence executives, then it's probably a good idea to consider this as part of your marketing strategy. So, I'd like to get into the, the sort of the storytelling aspect of this a bit more. So, you mentioned that executives tend to be the, the target audience for this.

How do you go about deciding, like, who you should target and how might you change your thought leadership to appeal to that audience?

Cindy Anderson: I think the way that you would consider who you target is really looking at your if you're creating thought leadership as part of an enterprise you're working in a thought leadership, you know, unit there, you would really want to connect your thought leadership to your business strategy.

And in most cases, you're going to know who your target audience is at the executive level. And you really want to be careful about targeting your thought leadership to take advantage of that link to your business strategy. So in our case the audience that we most often want to reach is the C suite executives.

So when we create Our surveys, our research surveys, we think about those executives that we want to reach and we're very targeted toward making sure that the parameters of our research actually apply to the audience that we want to reach. And if you are working in a, as a sole proprietor, let's say you're an architecture firm and the people who may are making decisions about your product or your service are let's say, or they're supply chain folks.

You would want to be very careful. Strategic about how you pick that audience and then craft your survey to assess what their needs are. And that's how you would look at that.

Richie Cotton: Alright, so Cindy, it seems like any organization really ought to know exactly what their executives want. So I like the idea that you need to think about, like, what are the business problems that those executives are trying to solve and then tell your story towards that. so A lot of the time in storytelling, we talk about like, you know, you've got things like the hero's journey and sort of standard story types.

Are there any equivalents of those for thought leadership?

Cindy Anderson: There are actually, the story types that we talk about most there are four basic story types in thought leadership. And they start with explainer pieces. So, an explainer is something that would take a. complex or an emerging topic and really unpack it, really get into it and kind of pull it apart and explore it and analyze it.

And you see a lot of that right now, thought leadership around that with especially around generative AI. So it's the hot new technology, right? We're in the hype cycle. And there's a lot of explainers about generative AI and how that's going to work. we're going to start to see a lot more of that on quantum in terms of the next.

Big technology. So explainer pieces is kind of the first story type. The second story type, you know, something that's related to maybe diversity sustainability, something that might be societal or a business issue that really needs to be looked at. The third type of thought leadership story is really a how to.

So that's more about helping people. business leaders figure out the best way to solve a problem or to look at case studies. That's where you see a lot of cases from organizations that have done this before. So that kind of, here's what other organizations have done. Here's what you might consider to solve your problem.

And then the fourth story type is really around Persuasive pieces. So that's, that's the kind of thought leadership that you would see. You mentioned earlier people who consider themselves thought leaders. That's the kind of story that usually someone who's considered a thought leader would want to use.

And they would bring their perspective, their unique perspective forward. And, you know, here's why you should be thinking about this topic right now. Here's why you really need to spend the time to investigate this at this moment in time. So explainers, issue pieces, how tos, and persuasive are the four story types for thought leadership, largely.

Richie Cotton: What's your process for creating thought leadership? Where do you begin?

Cindy Anderson: So you need to know what that sort of aha message is, that real hook before you get started. Otherwise, you really risk backing into something that tends to be watered down or like it's a rehashed message. it's not unique, it's not interesting. And we know that executives spend somewhere between two and three hours every week actually reading consuming felt leadership. 

The way that we like to have our teams think about the assessment of the aha is say, why would an executive spend part of their two to three hours that they're dedicating to consuming felt leadership on this topic right now?

Anthony Marshall: Yeah. So you think about the thought leadership value chain, it goes from sort of idea conception through to what do I need or what data intelligence do I need to analyze in order to think through what, what narratives do I want to create? Then it's the storyboarding. it's creating hypotheses.

It's, you know, whatever you do in order to create that right through to analysis, putting together the report and then providing the report. And this is the sort of thought process when, when we think about something like generative and the application of generative AI to the thought leadership value chain, this is how we sort of decompose that value chain.

we intersect technology like generative AI in slotting into these various things? So I think, is a value chain. It might be very different from one organization to another. It might be different types of data or, interviews might be used as opposed to, what we would call, panel data, for example. 

it could be any, number of inputs to validate, the hypothesis that you're creating as you sort of work through that floor.

Richie Cotton: So you mentioned the idea of a data interview. Can you just tell me more about what that involves?

Anthony Marshall: we use several different approaches in terms of the data inputs that we have. Traditional data, everyone would be familiar with you. You go out and you'd craft a survey. You work with a survey vendor or you deploy the survey yourself and you're getting data.

You analyze the data or you're actually conducting deep interviews with whomever you're interested in. From our perspective, it's typically business executives, but it could be anyone, depending on who your target audience is. And then you're sort of having those interviews. We also have a pretty big benchmarking capabilities.

So that's the sort of a benchmarking conversation, much of the discussion there really is about, Understanding the data captured within an organization so that we can sort of quantify that there are case studies, you know, there's any number of, ways that you could obtain the data, attain the insight and the intelligence that you're going to analyze.

Richie Cotton: Okay. survey analysis seems pretty standard. seems like, slightly more of a challenge, I guess, if you're interviewing lots of people, then trying to turn that into some sort of quantifiable result.

Anthony Marshall: Although there are mechanisms to do, analysis of, language and, and certainly some of the technologies, you know, the generative AI technology is starting to up. So we're starting to have the ability, you know, really at the infancy at this stage, but, but really look at time series to do those, you know, one of the early applications of gen AI to do that sort of analysis.

At scale that would have otherwise been not possible before that. So I think there's all sorts of interesting opportunities in addition to what people are sort of used to right now.

Richie Cotton: Yeah, that sounds quite cool. Like, I guess you guess that you get the transcript of all your interviews, put, summarize each one, like pull out like four of the spicy bits and then somehow compile those into, into statistics. Uh, Okay.

Anthony Marshall: from it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah,

Richie Cotton: Nice. Okay, cool. So, do you have any tips on how you might go out, like, communicating the results of these analyses? 

I guess, you're taking, yeah, a load of statistics, you've got to turn them into some sort of report. Talk me through, how do you explain things well?

Cindy Anderson: Yeah, I think that's similar to the story building approach and the value chain that Anthony mentioned, you know, there's a there's a specific sort of process and operation within thought leadership. So you'd start with your sort of aha, your kind of your thesis, your hypothesis. And then craft your survey, get your results of your survey, you've got your results, you do your analysis, you know, your hypothesis is either supported or not.

And then you pick your story type, which you probably already know when you go into it. and then what you do is, think about from a editorial perspective, you know, go back to your audience, who is your audience, what's the best way to, tell a story to that audience. 

And then. One of the things we talk about a lot is if you're writing for a big audience, then start small, Assume that you're writing to one person, you're having a conversation about the topic that the research is related to and write your, story. As if you're talking to that one person forget that you're trying to reach, you know, 300, 000 CEOs in technology companies around the world.

you craft that story for an audience of one knowing that it's going to go to a much larger audience. and that's a little bit how we keep it personal. And if you're in an organization that has generative AI capability, hyper personalization is one of those things that generative AI is really good at.

So you get your story written to your audience of, 300, 000 CEOs, CIOs and then you can actually hyper personalize to one or two or three or a one client or a particular industry or a particular geography based on what you know about that group by using generative AI. you do the hard work up front, right?

The humans do the hard work of analyzing the surveys and, coming up with the hypotheses and figuring out what the story is. But then you use generative AI tools to help you create those derivatives that hyper personalize and that extends or expands audiences with. content that's specifically relevant to what their needs are.

Richie Cotton: Okay, so since we had ROI in the title of this episode, let's talk about how you get value from these things. So, what constitutes a successful piece of thought leadership? Like, how do you track it? Like, what sort of metrics should you be looking for?

Cindy Anderson: We believe ROI is going to be the measure of success for thought leadership moving forward. But like many activities that are oriented around building relationships, marketing in particular, it's been very difficult to calculate a return on investment of that kind of activity. And as much as it helps executives make smarter business decisions, it really also helps organizations, get to that point where they can supercharge those client relationships.

And we know that because this research that we did that led us to calculating the value of the ROI of thought leadership proves that it is really immensely valuable. Previous efforts at ROI calculation have really been based on assumptions or estimates or expectations or things that have been done before.

But what we did is with this research, we were actually able to, take the data that we had collected, we crafted a survey specifically to collect this data, and get the results the survey that would allow us to calculate thought leadership based on the experience of the executives who actually use thought leaders.

So we surveyed 4, 000 business leaders around the world. and Richie, the magnitude of the impact of thought leadership on executives and their decision making and their purchase decision making in particular is really astounding. We were stunned by it. In fact, almost speechless for people who you use words a living.

we really almost didn't know what to say because what we found when we looked at the data and did the calculation was that thought leadership investment returns 156%. Versus a typical marketing campaign, which over time, as I mentioned, has been really difficult to measure, but returns nine.

So there's a 16 times premium for thought leadership ROI compared to a typical marketing campaign. We think that means that thought leadership has really earned its place as the platform that marketing leaders should really use to build the rest of their campaigns. You know, we kind of call it the eighth P of marketing.

Many marketers are familiar with P structure. And we think that thought leadership is really the eighth P, which is the platform. And if marketers use thought leadership as that platform they can, it's kind of like the missing piece. Honestly, they can use that as the anchor for their brand building and really deliver a strong return for their organizations.

And that's new. That's different. that hasn't been validated before. So we're really excited by that. And Kind of giving people that do what we do, giving CMOs really that evidence that thought leadership really is a valuable part of that marketing mix.

Richie Cotton: Okay that's very cool. Like, you're saying that you got surprised that it was sort of 16 times more valuable than other marketing channels. Or other marketing approaches. So that's, that's very, very cool stuff. I also like that it gets a bit meta because you're doing thought leadership about the value of thought leadership as well.

Nice. Okay. So you mentioned being the eighth P of marketing. Now I'm sure when I learned this in school, there were like four P's. It was price, product, place, and promotion. What are the other ones that I've missed in the last three decades?

Cindy Anderson: There's people, process, and physical evidence. So it's usually four or seven. going to be either the fifth or the eighth. So, yeah. Yeah. People, process, yeah.

Richie Cotton: yeah, it seems like a nice add on to the existing marketing attributes. All right. Nice. So, I'd like to talk a little bit about the use of generative AI as well. So, it seems like these days you can use generative AI to create almost any kind of Content pretty quickly and cheaply.

So, talk me through how can generative AI be used for creating thought leadership?

Anthony Marshall: I think it can be used well or badly, right? So badly is you use the generative AI to create the content. Now generated by its nature is a backward looking tool, and thought leadership is supposed to be something that's forward looking. And so already just at that very basic level, you start seeing some of the challenges of creating creative, visionary, thought leadership if you're just relying on generative AI.

So I think, even though it's very easy to produce more content, We know from our surveying that an executive and, Cindy mentioned that executives spend between two and three hours. A week consuming thought leadership at this stage, it's more on the three hour side. It was really two hours during COVID and it's been increasing since COVID.

So it's around three hours, but they only consume thought leadership from an average of five organizations. So even though the amount of generative AI oriented or created content has been expanding and probably will continue to expand dramatically. it's not all being consumed. It's just noise.

And so the way we think about Germany of AI is within the context of the value chain for thought leadership. Where can we insert it at specific places to improve scalability to improve productivity to deepen analysis? It's really augmenting supplementing human capability because it's You it can be immensely valuable at improving productivity, but you still need people, visionary people, visionary experts.

You still need data, proprietary data to formulate and create the story and actually come with the inspiration. Generative AI is really good at doing specific things and really bad at doing some other things. And so I think that's, the tension that we have with generative AI right now. 

Richie Cotton: So you're not going to get novel ideas from generative AI, at least an awful lot of work. So, basically it might be able to help you out with your data analysis, might be able to help you out with your story crafting. But you're going to need some humans in the process there at least to get the, the uniqueness generate good quality content, I think.

Okay. Wonderful. So, in terms of actually going about creating this stuff are there any sort of interesting analytical techniques that you might be using, but beyond just like it's survey analysis or is there anything more exciting going on there?

Anthony Marshall: it's evolving pretty, pretty dramatically. Certainly and in, thinking through, Sydney and I work for relatively large producer of thought leadership. We have an analytics team that is Kate, you know, of about 10 people that are capable of doing really deep analysis, different types of analysis.

certainly regression beyond regression analysis, but not every producer of thought leadership is able to do that. So, there's basic frequency is still a very useful way. of describing data, right? So, there is absolutely nothing wrong with looking at data from a very linear perspective.

And that's a, statistician joke, you know, um, and so, very simple perspective and sort of presenting that data. There's nothing wrong with that being said. in addition to the sort of analytical techniques that are out there that advance, you know, beyond the regression to some more complex stuff that generative AI is starting to catch up.

You know, a generative AI originally was around language and wasn't really quantitative. That being said, there's all sorts of possibilities with synthetic data with generative AI that are creating some really interesting opportunities, and that is in terms of really around the scale of data serving, doing surveying is really expensive and so big survey Of 10, 000 executives or employees or whomever, it really amounts to something between half a million and a million dollars.

And people just don't have that sort of budget available to them. But using synthetic data, you could do a survey that's substantially smaller and use some of the emerging techniques around generative AI to apply it to that. And some of the analysis that our team is doing about whether that is creating accurate forecasts of data very positive and the opportunity that is, that, a 400 in count survey could turn into a 14, 000 in count survey.

And what that allows you to do is sort of some of the. data cuts, the sub areas, whether it's by industry or region or by, you know, gender or, however you want to cut the data, starts to fall apart at low, very low numbers, it just loses its statistical significance. You can't infer uh, observations around a population from that sample. 

Using synthetic data allows you to do so with great accuracy. And so it sort of gives the scale of a McKinsey or a BCG or of an EY or a KPMG to organizations that can only afford a 400 end count survey. And it really can be extraordinarily powerful of allowing people to scale up their capabilities in a very robust and responsible way.

Richie Cotton: I do like the idea of just being able to do a lot more with less data because data is expensive to acquire. Yeah, certainly once you If getting executives time, that's an incredibly valuable thing. So yeah, I can certainly imagine how like half a million dollars for a survey is going to happen.

Okay. So yeah synthetic data. And I guess bootstrapping techniques just to kind of fill out blanks in the survey. Nice. And it seems like, because we talked about generative AI being able to create almost anything, you need to make sure that you've got high quality research.

So it seems like there's going to be some sort of trust issues with the audience on is this really going to be high quality research? So first of all, I guess, what best practices are there for research? And then also, how do you persuade the audience that your research is trustworthy?

Cindy Anderson: Well, our research actually indicated five distinct value levers. So the research is one part of it's the basis of the thought leadership, But in total, the thought leadership program really needs to build that trust for the organization, right? So if there are five sort of distinct levers that define what good thought leadership looks like.

And those are quality, uniqueness, reach, independence, and trust. So the first three, quality, uniqueness, and reach are really controlled by the producing organization, right? And each of those five levers has very different definitions or attributes that will drive toward trust. So quality is really about the answers that your thought leadership gives. And you get those answers through the research, right? So you pull all your data together, you do your analysis and you create a hypothesis, you create your point of view, you create your thesis.

And that's, really what delivers the quality. Is it, the right topic? Is it the right time? Does it give the, consumers, the readers the users of the thought leadership, the answers that they want? If you look at uniqueness, uniqueness is really about the questions. So that goes back to your point of, how do you define the research?

So you're not going to get uniqueness in your thought leadership if your questions don't allow for that kind of analysis. So you need to craft questions that are going to allow interesting insight. And, it's very rare that a piece of thought leadership will be a completely on a completely new topic.

What's much more common is that thought leadership will look at a topic that's been an analyzed or assessed before in a new way. And that's how you get to the uniqueness aspect through the research that you craft. And then reach is really about getting your thought leadership in front of the right people.

And from a research perspective, a survey perspective, that doesn't apply to the reach parameter as much. And reach is about getting into the right organizations, the right people in the right organizations at the time that they need the insight that you're delivering. Anthony mentioned that most users of thought leadership only, Consume it from one of five organizations at a time, right?

So you want to be one of the most five top organizations that an executive looks to for that trusted thought leadership, and you get it through that quality, uniqueness and reach.

Richie Cotton: Okay, so I like the idea that you have high quality research, but maybe like you can't distribute to hundreds of thousands of people, or it might be the other way around, or it might just be you're asking the same questions as everyone else. There's gonna be a bit more competition there. You need those three, the quality, uniqueness and range in order to be successful.

Okay, so I guess in terms of the figuring out how would you build after thought leadership program, what should your strategy be? Like, how do you get to success?

Anthony Marshall: So in terms of building a program, it really, you know, it depends on who you are. It depends on who your audience is. It depends how big you are, but we take very much a portfolio approach. for some organizations, building a portfolio program is, actually creating one piece of thought leadership.

And that's great. As long as it's high quality, you're true to the data, you're true to the, client or customer. And you, advance that piece of thought leadership in a very professional and rigorous way, Because needs to be trustworthy. It needs to, people need to be confident that what you're saying is true and the analysis is accurate from a larger organization.

We really think about it as a portfolio and, and having different types. So, so Cindy talked about the different types of. Of content and that really maps to your portfolio so for a large organization, what are they, the subjects, the topics that you want to cover and sort of thinking about those, some of them are, some of them could be quite visionary, some of them could be this big picture stuff, like what is the, like McKinsey did when we talked about study at the beginning.

What is generative AI? What's the impact of generative AI going to be over the next 10, 20 years? So very visionary. How is it going to transform industry? Or it can be very tactical, and it can be something about a specific business function or a business activity or a particular segment that, and going into some deep detail, leveraging benchmarking data potentially and sort of doing an analysis there.

Each of them are going to have their own Market their own targets and each of them is going to be deeply satisfying within the context of what it produces, but I think sort of thinking, what is your strategy? What are you trying to do achieve as an organization? What's your scale?

And then thinking, what is my portfolio of content that is going to. Yield the biggest value to my customers, because if I yield the value to my customers, I will yield it for myself.

Richie Cotton: Okay. I've said that's quite reassuring. So Cindy, when you were saying quite often executives will only consume thought leadership from just one of five organizations. So it sounded like you've got to have some sort of extensive program to be one of those five organizations. But Anthony, you're saying that basically you can just produce.

One piece, and as long as it hits your target audience, that makes sense. So, because at Datacamp, we have one piece of thought leadership. We do an annual report on the state of data and AI literacy. So that's good. One piece, sounds fine. All right, so, simple program. I guess, how do you Get started on this.

Like what's the first step in terms of getting your first piece of thought leadership out there?

Cindy Anderson: You should never produce a piece of thought leadership that doesn't align with your organizational strategy. And once it does, then your topic areas are pretty much unlimited, right? Which can be a real challenge for some organizations because they want to produce content, on a lot of different topics.

So. in our book, we outline a business model or an operational model for a thought leadership function and one of the most key aspects of that is to get a strategy team together to really define the topics that you want to cover. And so if that strategy group can help determine what is that kind of one anchor piece of thought leadership, the, the thing you're going to place your big bet on as a thought leadership producer that's aligned to your strategy and you start there and you're successful with that piece.

then you can build derivatives from that piece and expand into other areas. But we would always suggest starting with that one big sort of marquee piece of thought leadership that includes the data, that includes the analysis, that includes all of the expertise, the SME perspectives. that are important for thought leadership. 

That's how you're going to build the trust. So, get your strategy group together, align it to your corporate objectives, pick your big topic, and then, build it according to the quality, uniqueness, and reach attributes.

Richie Cotton: Okay, so I like that. Just think about what is the most important sort of area of your business and just go with that. All right. Nice. I think you convinced me that thought leadership is incredibly important and valuable stuff. Just to wrap up, what are you most excited about in the world of thought leadership?

Of

Anthony Marshall: excited about the new global thought leadership. Well, apart from our new book, we're excited about that. So that's very exciting, hopefully for you as well. Very exciting for us. But certainly more seriously, the Global Thought Leadership Institute of which Cindy and I are both on the board with Accenture and McKinsey and academia it's a nonprofit organization that is designed to build standards and certifications across the thought leadership domain.

And so it is within the auspices of APQC, which has been around for 40 years, is the global leader into productivity measurement and performance measurement. And the Global Thought Leadership Institute is. a new organization that only was performed six months ago, but I think it promises to be for thought leadership, what the project management institute has been for project management over the last 50 years.

and then that is something that, that helps build the community in a very inclusive way, whether people are, individual producers of thought leadership or small organizations or specific organization, or you've got your McKinsey's there, you've got your KPMGs and EYs there.

And so I think that's enormously exciting for the entire community. Cindy, anything you want to add to that, being on the board of the new GTLR,

Cindy Anderson: I agree with Anthony. I mean, it's, it's incredibly exciting to see the practice of thought leadership advance and really mature into a place where we're, influential enough to be able to support a, professional association like this. So, and I can't wait to see where we go with that over the course of the next several years.

Richie Cotton: Yeah, that sounds very cool, the idea that there's going to be standards around this. And best practices are going to be shared amongst everyone. Educating people on how to create great content. It's what I like. Brilliant. So, that was a great talk. Thank you so much for your time, Anthony and Cindy.

Anthony Marshall: thank you. Great to be here.

Cindy Anderson: pleasure. Thanks.