2.2 Communicate context
“Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17—, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.” So begins Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure Treasure Island.
Everyone knows that Treasure Island is about pirates and a hunt for buried treasure. And everyone know that pirates are scurvy sea dogs; malfeasants with parrots on their shoulders and pegs in place of legs. In their hand they hold an old map with a red X that marks the secret location of buried treasure on a far away tropical island. The pirates swig ale, count pieces of eight by day and drink rum by night (along with more rum during the day). And when so roused, they wield a black spot to treacherously depose their unfortunate captain. Names like Billy Bones and Long John Silver are immortalised in these pages.
Except, before Treasure Island was published none of these ideas were really associated with pirates. In one book, Stevenson single-handedly shaped the popular perception of pirates in a way that still influences to this day.
The book itself is comparatively short – only 250 pages. You could comfortably read it sat by a pool in a morning, but the ideas that it communicates are somehow much larger. Though it borrowed from tropes that already existed, Treasure Island has today shaped the de facto image of pirates and piracy that we see in popular culture. Treasure Island is a great example of a set of ideas that resonate; ideas that resonate in and reverberate around the mind of the reader far longer than they take to be consumed. If you can read a line of text and then have no further thoughts on what idea that communicated – which is the fate of most B2B copywriting – it isn’t resonant. But if you read a line of text, a tagline or a piece of ad copy and the idea it communicates takes hold, then it is.
Try this exercise one day. Take a group of people and ask them to write a description of a horse in a field. Ask them to add as much detail as possible, then ask them to read them back to each other. What you’ll find is your group each explain very different images. Horses will be different colours, fields will have different fences, the weather will be different and the field will have a different setting. Ideas can be simple, but the detail they manifest can be complex. Similarly, if you’ve ever played the game where you hum out a song and ask others to guess it, you will have some idea of how this works. The hummer will produce the song as they hear it in their head and thus think they have the right rhythm. The listener, though, will have none of the context from the internal acoustics, and so will hear just a series of one-note noises. If the song is well known it may be guessed quickly because they already have an idea of it in their mind. If it’s more niche then good luck to the guesser.
Ideas form differently in the minds of different audiences, and so they naturally take on different forms based upon the underlying understanding prior context. No idea is perfectly consistent across any audience – that’s not the way memory and resonance works. Memories and ideas are feelings, perceptions, recollections and data points. They swirl around and grow with a life of their own. And over time they change as they are combined, influenced or supplanted. Inception works the same way. Once it has taken hold, it grows, evolves and blossoms into another more powerful idea. Resonant ideas land because they provide the right amount of information for their audience to understand them. The most powerful virus is the idea, but for the virus to survive it has to take hold in a host.
The hardest part of communicating an idea is that everyone starts from a different place. There is no common grounding. The knowledge and experience of the communicator is different from the audience and the knowledge within audience differs from person to person. There is no standard of experience. Information is interpreted differently by everyone, and so the impact also differs from person to person. This is variance of baseline understanding is called the Context Gap. When communication suffers from a context gap it risks being wrongly interpreted. And getting ideas to resonate and connect to action is difficult enough without throwing the wildcard of misinterpretation into the mix. Most ideas fail to resonate because the communicator doesn’t know how to frame their ideas in a way that sticks with their audience.
How do you bridge the context gap? Quite simply, start with context; start with why. ‘Why’ works whether trying get to a decision, trying to kick off a meeting or trying to understand some feedback. Why are we trying to decide something? Because we’re spending too much currently. Why are we having this meeting? Because you need to be briefed on information that you need to understand. Why am I sharing this feedback? Because I want you to be successful. Whatever the reasons, crossing the context gap is a principle of clear communication, not just a foundation of inception. Ground your audience in a purpose. Simon Sinek explained exactly this in the perfectly named book Start with Why. Clearly, concisely, emotively articulate why you’re here. Why you exist. Why should people care? Why you make the lives of your customers or your customer’s customers better.
Purpose is ultimately about value, and to communicate your why is to communicate the story of value. The context gap is bridged when an audience understands this core truth. In Enterprise organisations a core truth is typically developed by Product Marketing, though it will usually require a more cross-functional team less familiar with the product and proposition – and thus more able to recognise a context gap – to challenge assumptions and pre-conceptions. Why does your purpose support the creation of value for customers and employees? The core truth is the idea – not the story – that sits at the heart of your communication. The purpose, the context, the why: this is the core truth with a story behind it. This is how you bridge a context gap.
Thought Leadership
As with fashion, design and technology, in Marketing an exciting name makes a regular idea appear more exciting. An interesting name sounds new, exciting, bold and – most importantly – worth paying attention to. Dull name; cool name. That is, until that cool name too becomes over-used too, at which point it is either deprecated for a simpler term, subsumed into a layer of business-as-usual, or supplanted by a new description. Too easily the original intent of the words behind a name become lost and a context gap forms between expectations and reality. In other words, a useful description becomes a useless buzzword. Thought Leadership, I believe, has become one of those buzzwords.
Thought Leadership is the expression of relevant, compelling, unique understanding in a particular field. True thought leadership originates not only because of expertise, but because of passion for the subject matter. Thought leadership is not ‘interesting content’ – this is the misunderstanding that has been perpetuated through many marketing teams. ‘Content’ is boring; ‘thought leadership’ drives results. Old name; new name. In reality, of course, internal name changes rarely drive any change in business impact. Customers and prospects decide whether your content is thought leadership or not, and the only victim to this misunderstanding is marketing budgets and team alignment.
Thought Leadership should directly connect to your organisation’s purpose – your core truth – and it should be the basis of bridging the context gap. It should also be articulated through every communication. If you have Field Marketing teams, Content Marketing teams, Product Marketing teams and Sales teams all telling different Thought Leadership narratives you are diluting and confusing your audience. Sales teams should lead with the same relevant, compelling unique understanding in their sales conversations as Marketing should in content strategies and demand generation. First-call decks should bridge the context gap with prospects by using the same value propositions as marketing event presentations, websites and campaign assets. Thought Leadership is a company-wide, share-price-moving differentiator for an organisation. Leadership is in the name, after all.
Marketing has not made thought leadership’s life easy by using it as a descriptor for multiple things. ‘Thought leadership’ can be intellectual property (usually articulated through an internal brand, values and solution framework). The team developing the IP and content may be called ‘thought leadership’. And the content assets derived from thought leadership IP are commonly just called ‘thought leadership’ themselves. But not all connect needs to be or should be thought leadership. Compelling content can be derivative of those unique, compelling ideas and still be engaging for customers. In fact, by prioritising investments in bigger, more strategic activities rather than diluting research and insight projects into myriad disconnected narratives more impactful, focused content journeys and assets can be created. If you are a marketing organisation that has multiple teams all claiming to create Thought Leadership you’re likely suffering from content development overspend, inconsistent narratives and disconnected teams. Individual projects and thought leadership ‘priorities’ overtake the company purpose and value leading to a widening rather than a narrowing of the context gap as different audiences take varying interpretations and perceptions away whenever they hear from you. Similarly, if you’re developing ‘content’ in isolation of thought leadership you are unlikely to be telling a connected story. Content and campaign strategy need not be less innovative and creative simply because they are activated with globally consistent, locally relevant data-backed core truths that are aligned across Marketing teams and Sales channels. But they will be more identifiable by customers and more likely to consistently build context.
What attributes does content need to be thought leadership?
Relevant: Thought Leadership needs to be relevant to the audience. Relevance could be connecting the dots between a germane problem and a hidden cause, or it could be highlighting a problem that has not been recognised and quantifying its likely impact. Not all insight needs to be earth-shattering but many times involves getting target audiences to re-evaluate some core assumptions so that you can build a new bridge to take them across.
Compelling: Thought Leadership does not necessarily need to compel action in isolation, but it needs to connect to consequences. It needs to draw conclusions that are relevant to the audience, and thus will impact them. When connected to compelling evidence (see the Understanding bullet) consequence helps the customer by giving them a framework for evaluating their decision making against. They must understand the cost of no action.
Unique: Perhaps the biggest mistake of much of the thought leadership I see is that it does little to tie back to the organisation that developed it. Creating relevant, compelling content with data and evidence that could equally be shared by your biggest competitors is doing their marketing team’s work for them. Thought Leadership should lead back uniquely to you. You are the organisation, team or people that own this unique, powerful perspective that is relevant and compelling: why would you give that away?
Understanding: understanding is different from opinion. Understanding is based upon data and fact that can be communicated and independently validated. Opinion can be unsubstantiated rumour, hearsay or perspective. Even genuine opinion pieces can require data behind them – thought leadership can project trends, data points or analysis into the future but everything relies upon data. Opinion without data is prognosticative fiction. Understanding requires expertise.
It’s worth noting that there is a potential dichotomy in the idea of relevance – any content shared with the wrong audience will not be relevant, after all. The assumption here is that you are building a thought leadership position for a defined audience, rather than just creating general content. You know who you aim to influence and sell to, after all.
Another note worth calling out is the fine line between ‘interesting’ and ‘compelling.’ If thought leadership doesn’t demonstrate how your leading thinking makes you a valuable long-term business partner then its best to stop calling it thought leadership and be clear what it really is: informed perspective. And informed perspective need not be a bad thing. Being a source of context and understanding on complex topics can be a valued attribute of a brand, but mis-labelling something doesn’t change what it is or what its value is to a customer. Simply researching a subject and sharing findings is not unique understanding; research and data need to frame the status quo as unsustainable, position the costs of failing to change, and lead the solution uniquely back to the organisation behind it. Research cannot simply benchmark a current state. Brands need clear thought leadership positions to articulate their purpose and bridge the context gap with customers. Reaching decisions on your marketing investment, sales enablement and leadership narratives uninformed by the truth that your thought leadership is not what it claims to be simply undermines your effectiveness. The table below should help you determine if your content is thought leadership or informed perspective.
