Traditional marketing is educating the market about the distinctive benefits of a company's products or services.
In advertising, we can be great entertainers, and share a wonderful and compelling vision of the distinctive benefits we offer. We can create a story full of drama that is vividly colorful and backed by powerful music and fireworks.
And all this will be like a small poster on the side of a glass house. Prospective customers might notice that poster or not... but, they will definitely be looking around it, through the glass walls.
Through those glass walls, they will know something of what it's like to be a customer of your company. They'll see it in the Yelp and Google reviews. They'll hear it in the stories people tell on social media. They'll feel it by stepping in the shoes of the storytellers the Internet has given so much power to.
The days of being able to successfully grow by marketing with advertising alone are over.
It's time to turn our marketing focus inward and through the company. We now need to:
- Look at and optimize every prospect and customer touch point. And, we need to
- Have a unified team with a clear mission supporting those exquisite touches.
So, at least as much as we are projecting outward with media, we need catalysts to look inwards and create reality tunnels full of ever-growing delight that go from the outside in. "Delight is at the end of the tunnel", as Richard Bandler, co-developer of NLP, would say. I would add that delight needs to be on the tunnel entrance and walls as well. If we want to stand out as the exceptional choice in our niche, we need to emulate Walt Disney designing a theme park ride and consider every point of contact in its sensory detail and effect on the emotions.
How well are your touch points defined in terms of the emotions and experience you want to elicit in your customers, clients, and team? How many ways have you experimented with different pathways to satisfying the needs you address?
Like an aquarium where the plants and fish come more fully to life as the temperature becomes perfect, these experience touch points of customer engagement grow best in the environment of a deeply aligned team. Both the people that customers and prospects connect with and those who support those people should come from a place of congruence with a clear mission that speaks to customer empathy and leadership.
So, it's not just about media anymore. When we combine the web media with optimized customer touch points and a deeply aligned team, the magic happens and the positive customer stories that emerge from this environment do much of the marketing work for us.
So, the marketing agency or consultant of the future needs a toolkit that includes not only media generation, but also customer interaction optimization tools like NLP, and organizational alignment tools like Systems Thinking. We can't just create beautiful marketing posters to put on glass houses.
10 Reasons Your 2023 Content Marketing Strategy Needs Strategic Thought Leadership
Strategic Thought Leadership offers a robust Content Marketing Strategy that can move the mind of a marketplace.
2 Key Areas Where Thought Leadership Enhances SEO
Thought Leadership Marketing can boost SEO with new audiences adding new keywords thus more traffic as well as better search results through enhanced engagement metrics. And the high authority content naturally attracts inbound links as a bonus.
Information is Not Insight
What happens when we take our marketing technology to the customer point of view?
Ross Printings Thought Leadership
Ross Printings Thought Leadership: 4 Ways Thought Leadership Marketing is Different
The LEO Model of Thought Leadership
With Thauts on making movies, theme parks, creativity, and Walt Disney's Imagineering... and how they apply to marketing
Marketing Tech-2022 - 3 Trends Shaping Marketing AI
Three trends are shaping how Artificial Intelligence is perceived and used in marketing. More responsiveness to the end customer and a role for AI that better supports human creativity will result.
infographic 8 Reasons Why Your Marketing Needs Thought Leadership
8 Reasons Why Your Marketing Needs it: Lock in Loyalty, Avoid being a Commodity, Market with Respect, Fulfillment of Creative Leadership, Be a Liberator, Escape the Design Trap, Demonstrate Excellence, Enhance SEO
Easy 4 Ingredient Recipe to Staying in the Zone
The flow state, sometimes known as the "zone," is a state of peak performance treasured by athletes, artists, and high performing businesspeople. Fields like Sports Psychology and NLP study this “peak performance” state in order to help people create it more consistently and utilize it for higher achievement
Thought Leadership FAQs
FAQs about Thought Leadership
43 Innovation Quotes to Inspire Your Next Idea
“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship...the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.” - Peter F. Drucker
The 6 Levels of the Aligned Team
Introduction to The 6 Levels of the Aligned Team - Creating a Congruent Peak Performance Company
5 Powerful Applications for NLP in Business
Do you value excellence in business? One definition of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) is the study and replication of excellence. As such, it has many applications in the business arena.
Five Levels Up to an Experience Centered Company
When I opened my first iPhone box, I was delighted. Here was a package that didn't require a knife or scissors to rip apart. Instead, it demonstrated deeper levels of thoughtful design by gently unfolding to a neatly designed interior. The shapes pleased my eyes.
4 Ways to Get Focus in the Age of Distraction
In today's world, the ability to consciously create focus is a tremendous strategic advantage. If you master that, you are a shark amongst minnows, a crocodile amongst turtles.
The 5 Reasons I Started a Mastermind
Sometimes, incremental progress will do the trick. Other times, only a breakthrough will do.
Two Ways to Market from Glass Houses
We are Marketing from Glass Houses
