Human-Centered Marketing: Thought Leadership
This edited excerpt is from Human-Centered Marketing by Ashley Faus ©2025 and is reproduced and adapted with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.
Decision-makers are more likely to buy from organizations that produce strong thought leadership content, and they’re more likely to stay with a current provider that produces strong thought leadership content, which confirms the company continues to offer insights and solutions compared to competitors.[1]
Unfortunately, the term “thought leadership” has a lot of baggage because too many people share a lot of fluff.
They talk about a grand future where everything is amazing, but they don’t share any plans for actually creating that future.
They talk about how far they’ve come, triumphing over a big failure in the past, but they neglect to share any insights from their journey.
They repeat quippy soundbites and hot takes, but they lack any nuance to help their audience improve.
Thought Leadership Is Not Executive Content
How often have you heard of teams calling any content that includes an executive or founder byline “thought leadership”? It happens all the time.
But executives and founders frequently have bylines, appear in videos, and share content on stages – that isn’t thought leadership.
Consider the quarterly earnings report. This is frequently delivered to investors and analysts by a chief executive officer (CEO), chief financial officer (CFO), or a founder. Yet, would you consider that content to be thought leadership? Probably not.
Teams can easily understand that, just because an executive shares the information in an earnings report, it doesn’t mean it’s thought leadership, but they struggle to make this differentiation in other narratives and assets.
Thought Leadership Is Not Why Or How We Made Our Product Or Service
Often, people think that talking about why you created something automatically makes it thought leadership content. The “why” is part of conceptual-depth content.
But, simply explaining why something is helpful or necessary does not make it thought leadership.
Again, this is easy to understand with simple examples, like “why you should eat a high-protein diet (it’s an essential ingredient for building big muscles)” but becomes much more difficult when translated to complex topics for brands.
Thought Leadership Is Not Non-Product Content
Some teams think that sharing learn-intent content or assets related to stories and practices automatically means it’s thought leadership content. This is incorrect.
Learn-intent content often teaches the audience about existing information, including well-known topics, referencing older research.
For example, Atlassian shared articles related to Agile methodology on increasing reach, engagement, and conversion.
While this learn-intent content is helpful, it’s based on well-known practices that originated with other creators.
Atlassian didn’t create the concepts, despite articulating them in practical terms for teams looking to learn about incorporating Agile practices into their team rituals and workflows.
Thought Leadership Is Not Being Contrarian
People often assume that being contrarian automatically makes you a thought leader, or that you must be contrarian if you want to be a thought leader.
In theory, being at the forefront of your industry means that you’re going against the best practices, status quo, and commonly held beliefs.
You’re introducing new ways of accomplishing something. You’re iterating on previous work, which probably means you’re dismantling some strategy and tactics, and that’s going to ruffle some feathers!
Sharing in this way is different from being contrarian. Being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian doesn’t make you a thought leader – it just makes you contrarian.
Simply saying the opposite of whatever is trendy is not thought leadership. You must add to the conversation, not just change it.
Attributes Of Thought Leadership
In the simplest terms, we can define thought leadership by looking at each word in the phrase. So, have thoughts, be a leader.
If you look at the anatomy of the phrase, you see that “thought” is really about having something of value to say; being a “leader” and showing “leadership” implies that you are worth following, and that people do, in fact, follow you.
True thought leadership content changes minds and enables action in a new direction. It balances lofty ideas with actionable insights.
Quality content is smart, helpful, and curated. It’s not thought leadership, however, unless it’s innovative, disruptive, and original.
If we continue the three-word descriptions, we can say that a thought leader is someone who is smart, shaping, and sharing. Let’s look at these attributes:
- Smart: You’re an expert and you have actionable insights.
- Sharing: You codify your insights and make them available for others to learn, use, and improve.
- Shaping: You have influence in your industry; your strategies and tactics become best practices.
Thought leadership is unique because it’s about a differentiated point of view informed by expertise and experience, original ideas, strategy, and/or execution, and helping the audience think, act, and achieve in new ways.
Thought leadership builds trust because it’s coming from someone with deep expertise and experience, and it enables someone to take action.
Pitfalls Of Thought Leadership Programs
In addition to the misunderstanding of the meaning of thought leadership, many companies make mistakes when trying to build thought leaders and thought leadership programs.
Marketers and public relations professionals often shortlist executives to build as the organization’s thought leaders.
This is particularly true in founder-led companies, with the assumption that the founder is the best person to be a thought leader.
Unfortunately, executives often struggle to be thought leaders for several reasons. First, they’re busy! These people often manage large organizations with tens or hundreds of people relying on them.
They’re responsible for a large budget, often owning the Profit & Loss statements, revenue goals and quotas, and customer growth numbers if they sit in the go-to-market organization, and efficiency, productivity, or cost savings if they sit on the engineering or IT side of the organization.
This means that they don’t have much time to experiment, iterate, and optimize, and then codify their findings in a way that others can follow. They don’t have time to create quality assets.
And they don’t have time to distribute content in multiple channels, answer follow-up questions, or otherwise engage with the audience consistently to build a large following.
It turns out that practitioners throughout the organization are often better suited to growing into thought leaders because they’re the ones grappling with the challenges and solving the complex problems.
The audience trusts them because they bring real-world experience to the stories and solutions they share, and they’re more likely to spend time on social media and build community with a larger peer network.
To read the full book, SEJ readers have an exclusive 25% discount code and free shipping to the US and UK. Use promo code SEJ25 at koganpage.com here.
More Resources:
- Human-Centered Marketing: The Right Message To The Right People
- AMA Recap: Reddit Leadership On Leveraging The Platform For Business Success
- The Role Of E-E-A-T In AI Narratives: Building Brand Authority For Search Success
[1] Kingsbury, Joe, Barik, Tusar, et al. (2023).
Featured Image: Zamrznuti tonovi/Shutterstock
