Tag: thought leadership

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Branding, Copywriting, Environment, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Some marketers are engaged in a vigorous debate between people who identify as “thought leaders” and those whose skins crawl when they hear the term.

Whether you love or hate the term, “thought leader”, marketing by showing leadership through content and letting people meaningfully engage with those ideas is undeniably powerful. 

That type of marketing hooked me when I first tried it, as a 15-year-old 3rd-year high school student, and I’ve been using it ever since. First, I used it only to spread my ideas. Later, I also marketed products and services based on those ideas. And those ideas built me a decent following (and, eventually, a decent consulting practice)—sharing them through my books, articles, presentations, interviews, media coverage, etc.

This takes time and energy, and I know many people who do it better than me. But it certainly can be done. One of my book launches garnered over 1,000,000 short-term Google hits (for the book title, an exact-match four word string that wouldn’t show up in any other context). It’s the only time anything I’ve done got a million hits on Google.

I’ve even managed to help shift several mindsets at the international or national or local level.

My biggest success was changing the attitude about a proposed local mountaintop housing development from “this is terrible but there’s nothing we can do” to “of course we’ll win! The question is how.” This campaign took just over a year and used everything I knew in 1999-2000 about marketing AND community organizing (and the knowledge/labor of many others)—but the mindset shift took only four or five months. And that mindset shift created the conditions for our victory.

Lawn sign from the Save the Mountain campaign in Hadley, MA, in front of Mount Holyoke (a state park next to the mountain we saved)
Lawn sign from the Save the Mountain campaign in Hadley, MA, in front of Mount Holyoke (a state park next to the mountain we saved)

I also like to think I helped change the idea that business has to be evil. Of the five books I’ve published since 2003 (and the 10 since my first book came out in 1980), four show how business can profitably address issues ranging from business ethics to ending poverty—while reversing environmental destruction. I’ve given dozens of “Making Green Sexy”, “Impossible is a Dare,” and other talks on how business can be heroes.) And it’s been years since I’ve heard “business ethics? That’s an oxymoron!” When I first started talking about business ethics as a success strategy, I heard that false “wisdom” constantly.

I like to think my activity is part of WHY I no longer hear that horrible sentence.

Leading with ideas means finding others who will amplify those ideas. It’s not a coincidence that I actively seek out media coverage, endorsements, and more. 

My latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World has a blurb from Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield on the front cover, another from Seth Godin on the back, and some 50 endorsements on the front pages. It has 4 guest essays from best-selling authors. These are some of the ways I’ve built credibility and gotten people interested, even though the book no longer has a current-year copyright.

One review of that book didn’t appear until 17 months after publication—and I’ve gotten reviews on books that were up to eight years old at the time. When you write about issues and do so with substance, your book can attract interest for years.

Of course, events can shift the relevance. If you try to repurpose articles on how to survive the coming Y2K crisis or books on the presidencies of Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, or Al Gore, thought leadership is not the image you’ll project. 😉

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Shannon Cherry posed an interesting question on her blog: how encouraging should she be of people who want to train with her and then essentially remarket her stuff? Should she be a thought leader, or build a brand?

I was perhaps a bit rambly in my response (even citing the Old Testament—Abraham as a persuasive marketer!), but I still think it’s worth sharing here, since the question touches on a number of concepts I’ve explored over the years:

  • How much should you cooperate with competitors?
  • Is the world grounded in abundance, or in scarcity?
  • How does it benefit you when you train a competitor?

Here’s what I wrote:

Shannon, I’ve experienced this tension many times. It’s easier to make my peace with other people getting wealthy (wealthier than I am) from my ideas, when I remember a few things:

1) As someone who describes myself as “in constant learning mode,” I have drawn from dozens of teachers and books over decades, synthesizing what works for me and putting my own imprint on the overall combination–which has quite a bit of original thought mixed in as well. But let’s face it: 80% of what I know and teach owes some debt to someone, somewhere—but not the same someone. So when someone borrows form me as part of their own larger mix, I’m OK with that (especially if they’re considerate enough to acknowledge me).

It would be a bit different if someone took and bottled everything I know as their own. I certainly get teed off when I see other people’s bylines on something I wrote—unless it went out as a press release, and then I see it as a supreme complement (I still remember the bylined NY Times article from maybe 10 years ago that lifted whole paragraphs from a press release I wrote for a client). But if someone takes one or two of my ideas and mixes it with some from others and some of their own, I think they are the legitimate owners of that “marketing salad.” I can’t think of any marketer whose ideas are 100% original; even Claude Hopkins studied his predecessors. Some, like Jay Abraham, Janet Switzer, and Dan Kennedy, may have more originality than most, but they are not working in a vaccuum. I suspect strongly that Dan Kennedy studied Jeffrey Lant, and that Lant studied Melvin Powers, and that Powers studied John Caples and Hopkins, and back it goes, past Lincoln, Jefferson, and Franklin, at least as far as the Biblical Abraham, who used his marketing skills to persuade God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if he could find ten righteous people. (Abraham won the argument, but couldn’t find the 10.)

2) I was so enchanted by Alex Mandossian’s concept of “the paradox of syndication” that I put it in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. This is kind of a bit like Godin’s Idea Virus: you get your stuff into as many places as possible, and it grows for you. A great example of this is Amazon: With the brilliant idea to offer a no-inventory, no-work bookstore to all sorts of mom-and-pop websites in the mid-90s, Amazon became a powerhouse. It was years later before so much of the action moved to Amazon’s own site; in the early days, it spread by offering this no-work profit center to anyone who wanted it. Again, when someone spreads your stuff around, it’s on some level a deep complement. Of course, it’s much more of a complement if they give you credit. I’m a big believer in this; my books typically have long lists of acknowledgments and lots of sources cited in the text. But if your plan is to be a thought leader, it kind of goes with the territory.

For myself, I’ve decided that spreading the idea virus, being the thought leader, is more important to me than getting the glory, since I am motivated by a strong desire to create social change. But the glory certainly feels good! I think Nancy Marmolejo may have said it best in her comment:

Thought leaders don’t ask permission, they go for it. Be the one who makes this a “both/and” story, not an “either/or”.

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