Over the course of my career, I’ve had the privilege to specialise in thought leadership, a fairly niche sub-discipline of B2B marketing. I’ve seen it grow from something that was primarily the domain of professional services firms to become a marketing technique used by pretty much all B2B sectors, particularly those with a service element to their business. Thought leadership is not a term that is universally loved, but there is a recognition that it works and helps companies create and maintain a distinctive positioning in a noisy and unpredictable world.

There are numerous reasons why thought leadership has become more popular. First, business has become increasingly specialised. A sector like technology, for example, has fragmented into myriad smaller sub-segments, each with their own very specific offerings. Demonstrating expertise in these niche domains has become essential, and thought leadership is a good vehicle for doing this. Second, companies within each of these specialisms look and sound quite similar. Expertise and a distinctive message are important ways in which companies stand apart, get noticed and win business.

Perhaps most importantly, these twin trends mean that B2B buying has become more fraught with risk. Choosing highly specialist providers is complex and buyers don’t want to get it wrong. As a result, they involve more people in the decision and this leads in turn to longer buying cycles. Thought leadership can be a way for sellers to guide that sales process, mitigate risks and bring along disparate buying groups.

This evolution of business means that we have seen thought leadership change over time as companies get to grips with it. Over the course of the past 30 years or so, I’d argue that we have seen three main phases, each with their own specific approach and model.

1990 to 2010: the publisher led model

The term thought leadership is often accredited to Joel Kurtzman, who coined it in 1994 while the editor of Strategy & Business magazine. But examples of thought leadership (as we might describe it today) long predate this. The McKinsey Quarterly, which was launched in 1964, was an early example, although it’s possible to go back much further than that. One often cited example is The Furrow magazine, which was first launched by agricultural manufacturer John Deere in 1895, and provided educational resources and advice on farming techniques, rather than pushing product.

Setting aside these outliers, thought leadership as a marketing concept only really got underway in the 1990s, and was pioneered by companies such as IBM, Deloitte and Accenture. At that time, many companies didn’t see themselves as content creators, and so relied heavily on publishers to produce and distribute their stories. In the early 2000s, I worked at the Financial Times and was editor of two series of sponsored print supplements. These were editorially independent but the topics were chosen by sponsors and covered core management issues of the day. I would argue that these were early examples of thought leadership, although I don’t think we called it that at the time.

Other publishers, such as The Economist, started offering similar services. But the approach was largely editorially led, which meant that companies had little say or ultimate control over the end message. It was “badge” sponsored thought leadership, rather than a truly collaborative effort that was focused on a marketing need.

2010 to 2020: the rise of insourcing and DIY thought leadership

When I co-founded Longitude Research back in 2011, we were on the cusp of a change. Companies were starting to get frustrated with the restrictions of editorially led thought leadership from publishers, and wanted greater control over their content output. The problem was that most of them did not have the resources in house to make this transition. Although thought leadership was (usually) controlled by marketing, the skills required were not always the same as those that were common in marketing teams. It required a greater emphasis on editorial and research skills, for example, which were more typically found in journalism or market research.

Of course, the shortage of these in-house skills was of huge benefit to independent agencies such as Longitude Research (later FT Longitude). We were more than happy to provide that specialist expertise to companies that did not want the expense of large, full-time thought leadership teams.

Around this time, some companies started to wonder if thought leadership was indeed a core competency that they ought to have in house, rather than always outsourcing it. There were pockets of this already in professional services teams but, over the course of this decade, in-house editorial and insights teams became more commonplace. Financial institutions were also keen adopters of in-sourcing, and some hired teams of journalists and created “newsrooms” that sat alongside their marketing and communications functions. This was particularly common among investment banks and asset management firms, for whom content and insight was an important differentiator.

But there were downsides to the in-sourced thought leadership model. These teams could be vulnerable to cost-cutting during tougher times. To a hard-nosed new CEO or CMO, these (often expensive) teams could look like a luxury, particularly if they acted more like internal think tanks rather than marketing teams who were genuinely close to the customer. These in-house think tanks sometimes produced great content, but it was often hard to show a clear connection between original insight and business outcomes. I’ve seen numerous thought leadership teams get drastically cut back or removed entirely in recent years, often as a result of a change in leadership and a shift in marketing focus.

2020 and beyond: why the future is fractional

In the past few years, these cost pressures and the economic difficulty of maintaining a fully-staffed thought leadership team have become the catalyst for a new approach. Many companies realised that hiring full-time researchers and editorial staff was not always that efficient. The nature of thought leadership is that there are peaks and troughs; some months can be extremely busy when flagship campaigns are being prepared and launched, while others can be quieter. This means that the overall utilisation of some staff can be low. COVID was also a driving force of change. With many companies accepting that employees wanted to be in the office less often, the rationale for a fully-staffed team became less strong.

This does not mean that in-sourcing has been abandoned: many producers still retain core in-house thought leadership teams. But it does mean that there is more of an emphasis on a variable, or fractional, resource.

The fractional thought leadership model is something that I see becoming increasingly relevant. It provides a variable resource that companies can use when they need it without incurring the expense and risks of building a complete in-house team. And, when done well, it goes beyond the traditional agency and freelance model by building closer, long-term relationships with client teams and by making a genuine investment in getting to know their business. This means that companies get access to experts who truly understand their commercial and marketing objectives, have specialist thought leadership knowledge, and who do not think in a short-term, project-based way.

Thought leadership is not going away: in fact, now that we are confronted with a tsunami of AI slop, the value of high quality, well researched content is becoming even greater. But cost pressures mean that companies need to be smarter than ever about how they plan, produce and deliver this content. That is why, in our view, the future is fractional.