In 1964, the US Supreme Court judge Potter Stewart was adjudicating in an obscenity trial. Rather than trying to define pornography, he said the following:

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”

I was thinking of this famous quote recently as I tried, not for the first time, to provide a definition of thought leadership. I can sympathise with Justice Stewart. Sometimes we use concepts and terms that evade easy definitions, and yet we often have a clear line in our minds dividing examples that meet our criteria and those that do not. We use cognitive short-cuts and pattern recognition to match items against prior experiences and, if they seem similar, our brain presents these features as a single entity and “fills in the blanks” to create a holistic picture. We know something when we see it, even if we are not sure why.

So why this detour into basic psychology and legal history? Well, I think it could be a tendency that holds us back when it comes to innovation in content marketing and thought leadership.

Let me explain. In recent months, my colleague James Watson and I have been sharing a presentation called “Thought leadership disrupted”. Our contention is that, although the discipline is more mature and widespread than ever, it is somewhat stuck in a rut. Research is often formulaic and overly reliant on surveys, and there’s a dependency on the same old formats, and particularly the long-form PDF. There’s a predictable structure for these reports, usually with something called an executive summary, which I have always considered to be a truly awful name for such an important section.

Despite years of evidence demonstrating that the readership of these reports is declining, they remain the centrepiece of most thought leadership campaigns. I’ve often considered that this is a problem of inertia. There’s a certain expectation about what a thought leadership report should look like, and an assumption that because a lot of effort has gone into researching it, the resulting output needs to be long and complex to do all this work justice. There is also, I think, an “I know it when I see it” factor. We look at these reports and, if they fit the parameters to which we’ve become accustomed - a long PDF with lots of bar charts, usually - then we’ll draw the conclusion that this must be a piece of thought leadership, rather than a dressed up piece of content with limited insight.

This mental shortcut creates a bit of a cognitive trap. We can’t easily define thought leadership but we know it when we see it, and so we look for certain patterns and features. When they’re present, the threshold is met, but when they’re absent, it's not. So companies will tend to ensure that these features are in place to avoid their piece of content being “devalued” and not seen as a serious piece of thought leadership. It’s just too risky to go to lots of effort to create a campaign only to be told it doesn’t fit certain criteria, so they play it safe and stick to a tried and tested formula.

Over the past year or two, we’ve seen the development of a more structured approach to thought leadership: more awards celebrating the category, and the application of standards from a body called the Global Thought Leadership Institute. As someone who has been involved in this space for 20 years or so, I’m delighted to see this area of B2B marketing getting the attention it deserves. But I worry too that this could pigeonhole the category because anything that falls outside of the usual expectations will not be seen to qualify. Companies will be too risk averse to step outside of narrow parameters and this will ultimately lead to audience disillusionment because most thought leadership outputs look and read the same. Progress and innovation will stall.

My hope is that we can think a little more broadly and creatively about what constitutes thought leadership. There are some examples of this but they are still quite rare. I’ve often found it frustrating that there is not a more creative approach to the category. There has, for example, been a very slow adoption of interactive and design-led campaigns, which I put partly down to the fear that leading with creativity does not look “serious” enough. That seems like a missed opportunity to me.

So rather than a Justice Stewart style “I know it when I see it”, I hope we will be surprised by what we find in future so that traditional boundaries and parameters are stretched. It’s certainly in the best interests of our audiences, who will be grateful for the variety, and I’d argue it’s in the best interests of companies too, who have for too long been churning out content that adheres to an overly rigid formula.

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