Where Business Intelligence Meets Marketing
By
Jack May
President, Strategic Radar
Thought Leadership: The #1 Mega Trend in B2B Marketing
Delivering value to clients beyond traditional goods and services has long been a mantra of marketing executives. Research recently conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) suggests that thought leadership, engaging clients in value-added strategic dialogue, will overtake many other traditional marketing techniques for attracting client attention and for generating new business among business-to-business (B2B) marketers. Equally important, participants in a B2B client study also conducted by the EIU, consistently responded that thought leadership techniques are the best way for providers of B2B services to reach their audience.
The results of these studies are not surprising. When marketing to sophisticated customers it is important to demonstrate value beyond traditional goods and services. Anymore, clients are not just looking for information, they are looking for expertise and insight that will help them better prepare for success in the changing world in which both you and they operate.
This paper identifies a few techniques for repurposing market research and intelligence information for B2B marketers to consider, so that you may offer the incremental value that clients expect from their providers.
The Core of Thought Leadership - Market Intelligence
Beyond traditional goods and services, what types of information are B2B clients looking for? According to the EIU’s B2B User Survey, clients are seeking insight into changing market conditions as well as validation of industry specific trends and developments. The chart below summarizes responses from more than 800 B2B customers regarding the types of global business information that are most important to them:
Figure 1 - Source: The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited, B to B User Survey, August 2007
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For most organizations, much of this market intelligence information already exists inside the company. Corporate teams such as competitive intelligence and marketing research often invest significant dollars in gathering and analyzing this information for internal purposes.
As illustrated in the diagram, the core of building thought leadership is the intersection between a company’s current investment in market trend data and the marketing department’s desire to deliver incremental value, engage in strategic discussion, and maintain lasting relationships with clients.
Your analysis and sense-making of the market data provides the foundational content for building your thought leadership program. The intellectual engagement and strategic perspective you can bring to clients of trends and uncertainties that shape future market conditions helps them to see beyond their current strategic focus. Helping clients improve their corporate peripheral vision provides sustaining value and a point of difference consistent with a strategic partnership.1
Delivering Market Intelligence for Thought Leadership Value: Best Practices
Packaging market intelligence for thought leadership value to your B2B clients requires following a few basic principles:
Be credible.
Providing biased market data that simply reinforces the relative appeal of your company’s products and services violates the trust and value that you are trying to build with your thought leadership effort. Reducing bias can be achieved by including a panel of outside experts in your business intelligence and thought leadership process. This panel of outside experts can be used to provide a future assessment of the market conditions for specific domains. Use of these experts also provides independence and transparency from any perceived business development agendas, which is important to establishing the credibility of your information.
Use the data to build memories of the future.
Help your clients connect the identified data and trends to meaningful images of the future. One technique ideal for accomplishing this is to use a scenario-based structure. This methodology anticipates multiple futures or scenarios that potentially exist within your marketplace. Each scenario is mapped out to reflect the existence of a hypothetical combination of market forces. As your thought leadership effort tracks the progression of these market forces a scenario or combination of scenarios begins to emerge.2 The illustration below shows the use of a set of four scenarios that border the realm of future possible conditions for a particular industry.
Figure 3
Source: Decision Strategies International, 2008
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Using this structure you can track changing market forces to the scenario or combination of scenarios that are beginning to emerge. Your thought leadership commentary should provide clients with a perspective on what it will take to win in the emerging market conditions, which markets will be most appealing, and the key success factors or core competencies needed to win in those market segments. This challenges your strategic secrets and creates the greatest potential value for your clients and strategic partners.
Engage in a scalable and efficient thought leadership process.
Building a successful thought leadership campaign is not a one-time project, but rather a continuous process that requires commitment. This commitment is often constrained because of resource limitations. It’s important that technology be leveraged to insure an efficient yet continuous and lasting delivery of market insight to your B2B clients. A Web-based “Industry Trends Dashboard” accessible through your Web site is one technique for implementing a scalable and efficient thought leadership process. The content from this dashboard can then be repurposed for the more traditional thought leadership communication techniques such as conferences, white papers and press releases.
Bringing It All Together with Strategic Monitoring and Value-Added Strategic Dialogue
Easy to access and use tools can be the center of any sustainable thought leadership process. Below is a sample of the Strategic Monitoring dashboard provided by Strategic Radar, Inc. that incorporates the best practice elements discussed above. The dashboard shown is currently used by a wide spectrum of organizations in the credit union industry.
Figure 4
Source: Strategic Radar, Inc., 2008
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Continuous monitoring, the dashboard, and the scenario structure that you have put in place provide the platform for a meaningful and recurring strategic dialogue with your clients. You are now prepared to provide valuable insight to your clients, which you’ll do by sharing ideas on the core competencies and capabilities they should consider in order to win in the scenario or combination of scenarios that are beginning to emerge as reflected through your thought leadership initiative.
Having the scenario structure and identifying the capabilities needed to win in each scenario provide organizations with the framework to successfully evaluate strategic investments as well as any initiatives that may be needed to close potential capability gaps. Some investments may help improve core competencies or capabilities across all the scenarios; other investments may be more fragile by providing benefit or value to just one or a small subset of scenarios. As certain scenarios begin to emerge, companies can establish a foothold by placing small bets or making investments in anticipation of future market conditions. This is done similar to how “options” are used in the financial markets.
The skilled strategic sales and marketing executive sponsoring the thought leadership initiative will come to client meetings prepared with ideas about how the products and services available today or in the future will help clients close any capability gaps that might exist. Further, strategic dialogue may lead to co-development, joint venture, or other forms of true strategic partnerships that prepare both organizations to lead the market by anticipating and responding quickly to changing market conditions.
Conclusion
B2B clients are demanding more value beyond traditional goods and services. They seek insight into changing market conditions, validation of industry specific trends, and information about new developments from their key providers. Delivering this kind of value is a differentiator today, but it is likely to become a cost of doing business in the future. By following a few basic principles, B2B marketers can repurpose investments in market intelligence for both strategic and marketing advantage. In addition, they can incorporate tools like Strategic Monitoring to help clients stay ahead of market trends and take action to
Notes
1Day, George S. and Schoemaker, Paul J. H. Peripheral Vision Detecting the Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company. Harvard Business School Press. 2006.
2Schoemaker, Paul J. H. Profiting from Uncertainty, Strategies for Succeeding No Matter What the Future Brings. The Free Press. 2002.
