Every marketer is anxious to achieve a good outcome when launching a new study. To create a ripple in the consciousness of their audience. A report on AI from Citrini Research published last weekend created a ripple significant enough to shift markets. 

Written as ‘a thought exercise in financial history, from the future’, the piece laid out a (seriously) bearish case for the potential impact of AI on the economy. In the scenario it maps out, unemployment in the US surges into double digit figures and widespread white collar job losses lead to a collapse in consumer spending. It also highlighted how AI will disrupt many existing businesses, especially within software. 

While views on the quality of the report vary widely, it’s undeniably had an impact. Some $200bn was wiped off US markets on Monday, as the S&P and other US exchanges fell by at least 1%. The share prices of various companies named in the report, such as DoorDash, Mastercard, Visa, ServiceNow and American Express, all fell. Nearly every major business paper covered the report, and it went viral on social media. The post sharing the study on X has generated over 10m views and around 900 comments so far. It’s fair to say that these are not typical results for analyst reports.

So what’s different here? Partly it’s the report itself. While most commentators lean negative (the FT describes it as ‘provocative and unprovable’; others go with sensationalist and dystopian; The Economist suggested that its economics are ‘shaky’), it’s clearly achieved cut-through. It’s somewhat Trumpian in its approach and style: a contrarian viewpoint, a fair amount of hyperbole, rather long and rambling (circa 7,000 words), but designed to appeal to a certain audience. Partly it’s about being released at the right time: financial markets are jittery, and uncertainty around the impact of AI is exceedingly high at the moment. Whether by luck or design, the timing was spot on.  

Are there lessons to take from Citrini’s report?  

Being impactful is one of the core tenets of how my colleague Rob defines thought leadership: distinctive, research-based content that influences audiences and has a positive brand or commercial impact. Like it or not, Citrini’s report probably makes the cut. 

But few B2B marketers are going to be in a position to carbon copy Citrini’s playbook to maximise the impact of their next research study. While certainly thought-provoking, the reality is that highly provocative and dystopian viewpoints rarely make it beyond the first executive brainstorming session; they almost certainly won’t make it past the brand governance committee. Not many executives would sign off on opening paragraphs stating: “This isn’t bear porn or AI doomer fan-fiction”; nor would they be willing to name a series of real companies and suggest that their business models are evaporating, and share prices will likely collapse. Equally, though, most companies are guilty of design by committee, and there is certainly merit in empowering one or two individuals to take the lead on the messaging, ahead of trying to please every last stakeholder within the business.  

A different lesson to be taken from this report is that it has emotional resonance, which corporate reports often lack. To link back to the earlier Trump analogy, you may not appreciate his world view, but he’s often very watchable and entertaining when he speaks. Far too many corporate brands focus on logic at the expense of emotion.  

What is also replicable is the report’s commitment to fleshing out a particular scenario very vividly - bringing the outcomes and consequences to life clearly and in depth. Most scenario-based reports lean dry and academic. It’d be more balanced to add at least one other scenario, to allow readers to compare the two and make up their own minds about which is more likely. A useful tactic can be to stake two executives against each other, and task each with providing contrasting views on a particular dilemma. Challenging business issues rarely have a black and white answer anyway.

Finally, there’s also a process lesson: the primary author says he spent over 100 hours during the course of a week to bring the piece to life. While I assume few will wish to replicate that, there is clearly merit in getting your analysis to market as quickly as possible, especially for certain topics. Few companies will be able to move quite so quickly as Citrini, but equally most could find ways to speed things up. It doesn’t need to take 4-6 months to get things to market. 

Other sources of inspiration 

That all said, there are plenty of other impactful campaigns out there that can also provide a source of inspiration. These can provide more meaningful inpt for those designing their campaigns for the year ahead. Let’s take these attributes of thought leadership in turn:

Distinctive 

• What would alignment between in-house legal teams and executives sound like, if it were set to music? Addleshaw Goddard’s Perfect Harmony campaign raised the bar when it came to ensuring distinctiveness in an otherwise dry B2B topic. 
• Deloitte’s Women @ Work study examines the workplace and societal factors that impact women’s careers. A multi-year campaign, it has helped the company carve out a distinctive position that not only boosts its corporate brand, but also its employer brand for attracting new talent. 
• The World Happiness Report is not a corporate endeavour, but the Oxford University-led study provides a distinctive perspective on which countries are truly performing from the perspective of their wellbeing.  

Research-based 

• Gong Lab’s long-running series of impressive and wide-ranging data-driven insights on sales performance has helped it carve out a clear niche in its specific marketplace: revenue intelligence data. 
• McKinsey’s A new future of work is a deeply-researched study that sought to better understand how jobs and labour markets would change as a result of AI, based on in-depth modelling to estimate net changes in employment demand by sector and occupation.  
• Cytiva (previously GE Healthcare) used both an in-depth survey and wide-ranging desk research to create a global biopharma index and boost its new brand.

Influential and impactful  

• The World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index, now rebranded as Business Ready, is probably the most influential study ever created - to the point that some governments set policies explicitly designed to improve their rankings. Controversial, yes, but also deeply influential. 
• Edelman’s 25-year old Trust Barometer has become the go-to resource on societal trust issues, polling over 33,000 respondents about how much they trust different business, media and government institutions.  
• The EIU’s Liveability Index is a widely cited resource for which cities have the best living conditions, generating thousands of media stories globally each year.