Thought Leadership is Key to Marketing Communications Today: How R Thought Leaders Influencing Your Customers?
Thought leadership whether it's from academics, industry experts and/or luminaries is now a seminal component of any marketing program, especially in the technology industry where the holy grail now is the business value of technology. The C suite and many LOB managers are now heavily involved in technology purchasing decisions, which have become much more centralized and collaborative. Do you know who the thought leaders in your industry are and how they are engaging with your customers through all the communications mediums now including social media? If you don't it's time to take a good look at your industry's landscape. The bullet list below depicts a high level view of a thought leadership classification model.
Thought Leadership Classification Model
Leveraging thought leaders to provide vision and enhance marketing is not new to our industry, or to SAP. However, it is becoming very important that vendors not only leverage their vision and content, but develop and maintain deep and healthy relationships with these important influencers, especially in these tough economic times. During the Perfect Storm of business process re-engineering in the 1980's, SAP came to market with ERP software at the same time Michael Hammer's book about reengineering the corporation radically changed C suite thinking, and revolutionized business process management. SAP worked with Michael Hammer throughout the world as a visionary thought leader and during the 1990's NCR's Teradata, leveraged Peppers and Rodgers, the original creators of CRM to promote their data warehouse. SAS institute (who also gets it) has been working with Tom Davenport a prolific author on all topics analytic and enterprise software related. Over the last two years SAP engaged with several of the industry's important thought leaders to promote the concept of business network transformation (BNT), as a result created a book entitled, Business Network Transformation: Strategies to Reconfigure Your Business Relationships for Competitive Advantage, proceeds from this book are contributed to the World Food Organization.
For the most part many universities haven't understood how to work with industry vendors outside of the traditional research grant until recently; however, this is changing significantly in the millennium. Entrepreneurial professors have formed their own consulting arms over the past several years to work directly with vendors and are now deeply engaged with many of your customers.
Thought leadership whether it's from academics, industry experts and/or luminaries is now a seminal component of any marketing program, especially in the technology industry where the holy grail now is the business value of technology. The C suite and many LOB managers are now heavily involved in technology purchasing decisions, which have become much more centralized and collaborative. Do you know who the thought leaders in your industry are and how they are engaging with your customers through all the communications mediums now including social media? If you don't it's time to take a good look at your industry's landscape. The bullet list below depicts a high level view of a thought leadership classification model.
Thought Leadership Classification Model
Suggested Reading this month is Ranjay Gulati's new book, Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, and I have had the pleasure of working with Ranjay over the last several years. "Customer data, information and case studies are the lifeblood of thought leadership, "without them thought leaders live with their heads in the clouds, but their feet are not on the ground," said Ranjay Gulati of Harvard Business School." Gulati keeps his feet on the ground and his head in the clouds by working with vendors and customers alike, much like Mohan Sawhney of Kellogg and Henry Chesborough of UC Berkeley. As leaders in strategy, vision, execution and management, the hallmark and success of any successful thought leader is their knowledge of customer success. Pick up any business management book today and you will quickly find yourself reading about company success stories in innovation, organizational management, human resources and product development. Thought leaders need access to customers and the responsibility of (the most advanced) vendors today is the development and maintenance of these key relationships with the leading thought leaders worldwide.
- Policy & Institutes
- Strategy & Planning
- Change
- Innovation & Collaboration
- Leadership
- Infrastructure
- Operations
- Finance
Leveraging thought leaders to provide vision and enhance marketing is not new to our industry, or to SAP. However, it is becoming very important that vendors not only leverage their vision and content, but develop and maintain deep and healthy relationships with these important influencers, especially in these tough economic times. During the Perfect Storm of business process re-engineering in the 1980's, SAP came to market with ERP software at the same time Michael Hammer's book about reengineering the corporation radically changed C suite thinking, and revolutionized business process management. SAP worked with Michael Hammer throughout the world as a visionary thought leader and during the 1990's NCR's Teradata, leveraged Peppers and Rodgers, the original creators of CRM to promote their data warehouse. SAS institute (who also gets it) has been working with Tom Davenport a prolific author on all topics analytic and enterprise software related. Over the last two years SAP engaged with several of the industry's important thought leaders to promote the concept of business network transformation (BNT), as a result created a book entitled, Business Network Transformation: Strategies to Reconfigure Your Business Relationships for Competitive Advantage, proceeds from this book are contributed to the World Food Organization.
For the most part many universities haven't understood how to work with industry vendors outside of the traditional research grant until recently; however, this is changing significantly in the millennium. Entrepreneurial professors have formed their own consulting arms over the past several years to work directly with vendors and are now deeply engaged with many of your customers.
- Harvard's Kaplan and Norton formed the powerhouse Palladium group now the gold standard for performance management experts and even have their own social media peer group called XPC.
- Harvard Business School's Clayton Christiansen formed Innosight.
- Marco Iansiti, the author of The Keystone Advantage and also a Harvard professor created the Keystone Strategy Group.
- Mohan Sawhney of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Business is on the board of British Petroleum, and he is working directly with many large technology vendors, and his new book The Global Brain is also worth looking at.
- Ranjay Gulati of Harvard is working directly with General Electric on innovation and customer centricity and has published a book: Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business.
- Ram Charan now the world's leading strategic management consultant is working with many of the world's leading CEOs and their boards by stretching their minds and challenging their philosophies and management styles. He has published too many books, (some co-authored with CEOs) to list.
- Dr. Henry Chesborough of Berkeley's Hass School of Business formed a unique alliance network of innovation peers from industry, universities and technology vendors all collaborating together in an open forum to discuss one of the hottest topics of today, innovation.