Most consultancy owners implicitly know that being recognised as an expert in a particular area is vital for their professional standing and winning new clients.

This was strongly supported by recent research by professors Tim Morris and Will Harvey (Said Business School, Oxford and University of Exeter Business School respectively) who found thought leadership activity

 FT and MCA deliver twin accolades for Kelso management consultancy client Simon-Kucher

For management consultancies looking to add oomph and impact into their thought leadership

Nine signs your thought leadership campaign will go wrong.. and how to sort it out

Your management consultancy is ambitious.  It sees an opportunity and wants to stand out as the go-to firm.  You want clients and prospects to recognise you as experts.

But standing out in a crowded market is difficult, so what could be better than an attention-grabbing "thought leadership" initiative?  After all, market leaders like Accenture, Clifford Chance, McKinsey and PwC do lots of it,

It's time for management consultancies to be measuring the return on investment from their marketing 

Gauging the return on investment of marketing activity is a fundamentally important metric for management consultancies looking to grow, yet many we meet struggle to know whether the  time and money spent on marketing produces an effective return.

Many only measure short term metrics 

New research reveals how to change a management consultancy's reputation

I took part in an interesting discussion last week hosted by the Management Consultancies Association where professors Tim Morris and Will Harvey (Said Business School, Oxford and University of Exeter Business School respectively) presented new research they've been doing into how management consultancies protect and improve their brand.

To jump to their conclusions, the three ways their in-depth research showed as effective in changing (i.e. improving or shifting) a management consultancy's brand are:

1. Focusing on the partners to ensure the experience every client and prospect has are as close as humanly as possible to the new perception

I used to strongly advocate management consultants putting effort into their profile, building up their network and using LinkedIn for communicating. It seemed on the verge of turning into a really handy mini-CRM for social selling.

But no more, all the useful functionality has disappeared without notice or warning.

Some of the important disappearances include:

• Ability to categorise your contacts into groups - gone!
• Ability to send messages

In a few weeks time I'll be on a panel at a marketing summit where I will be discussing how to measure the return of investment for Thought Leadership activities.

It sounds an esoteric subject and immediately begs some specific questions like:"What is Thought Leadership?"; "What resources are being invested and how do I cost such inputs as non-billable time?"; and "What actually is the return I am looking for and how will I know when I achieve it?". 

Measuring the impact and the ROI is really fundamental, but too often businesses leave considering this until after the campaign, rather than early on as it is developed.

It's easy to start over-complicating things, so the key question management consultants and their marketing teams involved in Thought Leadership projects should be asking are: