Turning raw ideas into lasting intellectual capital

The raw material for an organization’s thought leadership resides in the minds of its business leaders. It often falls to the organization’s marketing leaders to extract that knowledge and turn it into tools that can be harnessed for business development and marketing initiatives. Those marketing leaders, however, are often stretched thin by growing portfolios of responsibility—a problem that has only grown worse in a time of leaner staffs.

Athlon provides marketing leaders with a turnkey solution to their thought leadership needs and offers senior business leaders a peer-level resource to turn their thoughts into production-ready material.

Claiming the territory

Because thought leadership pieces are so difficult to produce, it’s easy for them to become an end in themselves—boxes to be checked off on the year’s marketing plan. We don’t think this is good enough. We begin the process by working with both marketing and business leaders to develop a strategy for the organization to own a piece of the industry dialogue that reaches their target audience. This initial step can define a single project, an ongoing series (such as an annual survey of a newsworthy industry issue) or a complete thought leadership campaign for a business unit or enterprise.

Peer-to-peer brainstoming

The senior executives who are the organization’s subject matter experts rarely have the time to fully develop the thought leadership pieces they need—or to explain the basics to third parties. The people at Athlon are distinguished by their ability to quickly achieve an intellectual comfort level with leaders in any industry, asking the informed questions, helping to connect the dots, and fully developing the nuances of the message. We also look for opportunities to develop proprietary models and diagnostics that expand the organization’s intellectual property and provide a foundation for ongoing outreach.

Telling the story with data

Data, such as that generated by surveys of industry leaders or the analysis of publicly available information, can be a powerful component of any thought leadership effort. But the results are often underwhelming—a series of statistical graphs accompanied by text that describes the graphs.  We take the data further, conducting our own analysis to uncover hidden patterns, and then build a compelling narrative that acts as a platform for our clients’ expertise and insight.    

We then develop multiple iterations of the thought leadership deliverable, working with both marketing and business leaders to quickly refine as necessary.  This step can include the design of a total visual package that presents the information in a compelling way consistent with the organization’s established look.

Finally, we provide whatever additional resources are necessary for maximizing leverage across communication channels, including press releases and talking points for media interviews, presentation decks, web site copy, and so on. We brief and support the appropriate internal and external members of the organization’s marketing and communications team so they can generate demonstrable results.

After the project’s conclusion, the results are reviewed with both marketing and business leaders and measure against expectations so that learning can be incorporated into future projects.