Mind Readings: Establishing Thought Leadership With Speed

In today's episode, let's talk about mind share, thought leadership, if you will. When we talk about thought leadership, we're talking in some ways about mind share, about how much share of mind or how much share of memory you have versus competitors. When someone brings up a topic, are you on the short list of people or brands that uh everyone remembers without being prompted? For example, say I name uh a chain of coffee shops. What brands come to mind?

Now, some people will say the nearly ubiquitous Starbucks. Uh, some people say the uh almost as ubiquitous Dunkin' Donuts, there'll be a few other uh chains, perhaps a favorite local coffee shop of yours uh that you have. But generally speaking, there's not a ton of brands that have the mind share that that simple unaided recall question can bring up. So, what does this have to do with thought leadership? Well, thought leadership is about establishing that same kind of mind share for you or your brand.

And to do that, we have to be memorable. How do we achieve memorability? Well, there's four basic principles of memory, at least uh according to Dr. Wendy Suzuki over at New York University. And those four principles are association, emotion, novelty, and repetition.

When something new comes along, like, for example, Chat GPT, you'll notice a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon very, very quickly. Why is that? They're trying to establish some level of mind share, some level of thought leadership, associating themselves and their personal brands with the hot topic of the day. This has been a thing forever, right? In the early days of podcasting, uh, once podcasting had some level of minimum viability, there was a whole bunch of podcast experts that came out of the woodwork with all these claims, and some of them achieved pretty decent mind share.

Well, how did they do that? Why did they do that? Again, we go back to Dr. Suzuki's four principles of memory. If you repeat something often enough, people tend to believe it, uh, whether or not it's true.

If you are the first, if you have the the advantage of novelty, you have a a very strong beachhead to grow from. If you can be the first person to introduce someone else to a new concept, particularly one that's valuable or has the potential to be valuable, you achieve a lot of mind share. That's why uh you had a whole bunch of people as soon as uh cryptocurrencies became viable, they're just jumping on that bandwagon. You had a whole bunch of people when SEO became a profession, you know, uh going from webmasters to to SEO professionals, uh, same basic work, but just slightly different outcomes. Again, people jumped on that bandwagon and achieved that level of mind share.

And over time, you know, people pivot, people change what it is that they want to be known for uh as the market changes. So, what does this have to do with your brand and your marketing? Here's the thing being correct, coming out of the gate with correct information is important, right? Because obviously credibility, trustworthiness is part of your personal brand and it's part of branding in general. If your reputation is such that you're dispensing information that is clearly wrong, um, you will not do well.

But one of the challenges that a lot of thought leaders run into is that they don't get enough visibility quickly enough to establish that beachhead. They don't have take advantage of that novelty, and because they're so late to the game, they don't have the repetition advantage of somebody who is maybe less qualified, but is out there saying and doing stuff longer and therefore achieves a repetition advantage. So whatever the next big thing is, if you want to be perceived as a thought leader in it, or if in fact you are an actual leader in it and you want to claim the thought leadership share of it, you've got to take advantage of those four principles of memory very, very quickly. Um this is something that I ran into recently on in the the Save Warrior None campaign that I'm part of. There's a whole bunch of different groups all clamoring for attention.

And there was this big event that happened, and uh some very, very prominent speakers spoke, and all the different groups are trying to figure out how to leverage that news to draw attention to their efforts. Perfectly valid, right? Um, if you want to be seen and perceived as a leader, you you need to get out there with that information. Who wins? The group that gets there first.

The group that gets the correct information out first is going to win that particular round of mind share. Because in this particular case, you have already have association, right? The cause itself is memorable. You have strong emotion involved. That's principle two of memory.

You have the opportunity for repetition, but most of all, you have the novelty, the newness approach. And that newness that being first to market really matters for being perceived as as a leader in that position. You've got to be out of the out of the gate the fastest with correct information. Again, I can't emphasize that enough. The information has to be correct.

You can't go to market with uh stuff that's just blatantly false. It's just not going to go well. But if you are trying to establish a beach head of memorability, you've got to be faster than your competition. You've got to be more agile, you've got to have resources and technologies on your side that get you to market as quickly as possible. So in your industry, in your vertical, in your within your customer base, how fast are you at getting out correct information?

How fast are you that allows you to take advantage of that novelty part of memory that also allows you the most runtime, the most lead time for repetition to associate your brand with whatever the topic of the day is. That's how you can establish a strong bit of thought leadership using those four principles of memory. That's the episode for today. Thanks for watching. Talk to you soon.

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