Yet while the study showed that thought leadership was rare, the consulting firms that achieved it were far more likely to generate substantial market awareness and business leads than consulting firms that admitted to communicating weak ideas in their newsletters, conference speeches, books, and other marketing programs. In other words, content is king in consulting marketing.

The strength of the ideas that consulting firms market — especially the relevance of their concepts, the case study and other data that they have that validate their prescriptions, their clarity and practicality — is the key determinant of whether their marketing investments produce substantial new revenue and market eminence or client indifference and wasted spending. In the following paragraphs, we discuss the findings of our study and what they mean for the way consulting firms develop, capture, and market their intellectual capital.

In Search of Thought Leadership

Like consumer products and services, consulting firms in the past 10 years increasingly been have appearing on prime time TV and other media, with broadcast and print advertisements and sponsorships of golf, racing, and other events. Firms such as Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, and Booz Allen Hamilton have spent heavily on brand marketing to raise their public image. Nonetheless, the 109 consulting firms that took our survey said that strong intellectual capital (IC) to serve as the content of their marketing programs was by far the most important factor in effective marketing (see Exhibit 1). In fact, they said that strong IC beat having a strong brand and image, a competent sales force, a good marketing strategy, and other marketing success factors.

Not only did consulting firms rate robust intellectual capital as the key to effective marketing, but also 70 percent said that its importance had increased in the past five years, primarily because of rising competition (and the need to differentiate your services), more demanding clients, and past success in marketing strong ideas.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Consulting concepts such as business reengineering, Six Sigma, and customer loyalty management have generated billions of dollars in consulting services since the 1990s. The firms we polled add further evidence to the belief that “thought leadership” sells. Consulting firm respondents who said that their firm’s intellectual capital was far superior to their competitors’ IC also were much more likely than those with inferior IC to say that their IC generated a substantial number of leads and market awareness. In fact, 83 percent of the consultancies with far superior IC said that their marketing content was effective or very effective at spawning a significant number of leads and substantial client awareness. In contrast, none of the consulting firms with inferior IC said that they generated lots of market interest.