Thought leadership is all about having interesting and attention-grabbing insights on the big problems facing your customers.

You could be using these insights in interesting articles and blogs, well-argued reports and white papers, and also delivering them in videos, LinkedIn posts and of course face-to-face in meetings and when speaking at events.

But is there research out there showing it brings commercial benefits for management consultancies?

Sadly all the research on training effectiveness indicates that much training has little impact.

Generally this is not a reflection on the quality of the training. It reflects the difficulty of people applying the lessons learned when they are "back in the office".

If you listened to our recent webinar on

The Kelso Consulting team has worked on a lot of thought leadership campaigns with management and other consulting firms.  We have also interviewed numerous people about their own successes and failures too.

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,

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

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:

9 tell-tale signs your consultancy's campaign is doomed from the start!

Drip-drip marketing hardly brings in leads

We've just held a seminar looking at how to make management consultant's sales pipelines work better.

Before it, our participants assisted with some research.  It showed that many of them were already doing a lot of marketing, such as events and some sort of regular technical update or newsletters.  

Why thought leadership is essential for consultants and their firms:

"Thought leadership" is the term for activity that positions you and your business as a leading expert on an important area.

Webinar: Thought leadership for management consultants

Management consultancy firms are ideally placed to utilise "thought leadership" to create the sort of ideas that will grab the attention of senior executives and business owners.