Using a mix of educational marketing channels. Many consulting firms think that a single marketing success — a Harvard Business Review article, a book, or a marketing event — will pry open a whole new market. This isn’t the case. The IC leaders that we surveyed used a much broader range of marketing activities in attracting clients to their ideas. They were far more likely than IC laggards to stage their own seminars and present at industry conferences and post articles on their Web sites and write articles for management journals and publish books and write email newsletters.

The channels consulting firms use are also important. IC leaders found advertising, trade show booths, and sales brochures to be ineffective ways of marketing their ideas. These are “low-bandwidth, high-bias” marketing channels. Because of their nature, they don’t allow consulting firms to impart much information on a specific area of their expertise — and they are blatantly promotional. In contrast, the most effective marketing channels for selling ideas were firm-produced seminars, conference presentations, firm publications, bylined articles in third-party journals, and other activities. Such high-bandwidth, low-bias marketing channels are inherently educational and allow for deep exploration of a business issue.

Measuring impact. Consulting marketers and IC developers almost always complain about insufficient resources. There would be fewer complaints if they could show the managing director and other firm partners their value. Knowing the kinds of returns that thought leadership marketing can generate would loosen the purse strings. In fact, IC leaders in our study were far more likely than IC laggards to measure their efforts — and do so with more meaningful metrics such as the number of proposals won and revenue generated that were precipitated by an article download, convention speech, or some other marketing activity (Exhibit 3).

Thought Leadership: A Luxury Becomes a Necessity

The largest consulting firms know the market advantages that thought leadership status confers on them. McKinsey, Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, Bain, and others spend significant sums in developing and marketing their intellectual capital. But three forces will raise the ante for thought leadership in the next few years: the increasing use of in-house consultants, increasing competition in the consulting industry, and the offshoring of the consulting business.

Companies such as Google, Fidelity Investments, Johnson & Johnson, and JP Morgan Chase have built in-house consulting units. Their edge over outside consulting firms is, of course, knowledge of their companies’ internal workings. Consulting firms that hope to work in such firms must be able to demonstrate whole new expertise that is vital to their success.

Increasing competition in the consulting industry makes it easier for clients to play consultancies off of one another — unless one of them stands out with clearly differentiated expertise. And while offshoring has focused largely on IT services and call centers, Indian and Chinese offshoring firms will soon have a large pool of business school graduates on whom to build substantial strategy and operations consulting firms — for a fraction of the price.

Then, consulting firms will no longer debate their investments in intellectual capital development and marketing. They will stop questioning the value of thought leadership. Their focus will shift to generating the most out of those investments and attaining and maintaining thought leadership.