Introduction
Is your brand lost in a crowded market?
Want to carve out your space?
Let’s talk corporate thought leadership!
Mikkel Svold is here to flip the script!
Too many companies—especially in science and engineering—mix up product promotion with true thought leadership. In this episode of “The Content Universe,” Mikkel breaks it down.
He’ll guide you through the real essence of thought leadership and how to move beyond just showcasing your products.
Think of it as becoming an industry visionary!
Join Mikkel as he shares juicy insights from a recent chat with a client, uncovering how to position your business as a go-to voice in your field.
From owning industry conversations to thinking like a trade mag, Mikkel gives you actionable strategies to elevate your brand.
With real-world examples—from Power2X innovations to sustainable construction—you’ll find fresh inspiration to reshape your company’s narrative.
Get ready to shift your focus from products to powerful industry discourse.
Are you ready to redefine leadership in your space?
Let’s dive in! Listen now!
What You’ll Learn
• What corporate thought leadership truly means.
• How to transition from product-focused to thought leadership.
• The importance of owning an industry agenda.
• Using magazine-style content strategies for authority.
• Leveraging external expert interviews for enhanced credibility.
• Examples of implementing thought leadership across industries.
Episode Transcript
Hello and welcome to the content universe! Today, well actually it was yesterday. I want to talk about it today because yesterday I had a discussion with a client about thought leadership, about how they could position themselves as thought leaders. What corporate thought leadership is all about. So I figured that today why not try and basically sum up that talk and then talk about what is corporate thought leadership? What does it mean? What does it entail? What is corporate thought leadership? That is what we are talking about today and for those of you who are just tuning in on this podcast, my name is Mikkel Svold and the concept of this podcast is to be this kind of vlog style without the video part, but a vlog style podcast where I kind of look at what have I been doing for the last day or two and then turning that into something that hopefully is useful for you guys out there listening. And again, if you don’t know me, my name is Mikkel Svold and I run the company Montanus. We produce podcasts, we produce blog post articles, social media posts, all that kind of stuff for mainly high tech or technology kinds of companies, knowledge-driven companies that is.
Now back to what is corporate thought leadership and I think it’s beneficial to start by looking at what is thought leadership not, because especially I think for the branch of industries that I work with, actually I don’t know if that’s exclusive to them, but what I realized when I work with business-to-business companies is that they often have a really cool product and then they build the entire business around that and then suddenly comes an urge to position yourself as something that is not a component deliverer, a component supplier, but something that is higher up in the value chain, someone who can advise, someone who knows a lot of stuff about the industry, and that also then means that you want to position yourself as a thought leader. That is the strive.
The challenge here is that when you come from a mindset of the product, oftentimes what I see is that corporate thought leadership or when they induce that thought into the brand, we try and look at what is the product and then brainstorm what we can share knowledge about. The problem with that is if your outset is the product, the brainstorm that you’re getting is most likely very product related and that is the exact opposite of this shift towards being an industry thought leader. That is the exact opposite of that. So if you only brainstorm with the outset of the product or the service that you provide, well then you’re actually stepping back into that role of the component supplier which is, well, not the strategy.
So what is corporate thought leadership not? It is not looking at your product and then trying to brainstorm topics. Rather it is seeing what domain you are working in and then trying to take ownership of that domain. It is looking at the industry. It is looking at maybe an agenda in the industry and then owning that agenda. And it actually sounds really easy, but it’s super hard because what agenda should it be? What is your niche in the market? What is your edge in the market? What do you have to offer of knowledge that competitors do not? Maybe actually, I want to correct myself here, maybe your competitors do have that knowledge too. But there is a difference between having knowledge and sharing the knowledge. And that difference is what I call the difference between experts and thought leaders because you can’t be a thought leader without being an expert, but you can be an expert without being a thought leader. That just means that you don’t share what you know.
Okay, so corporate thought leadership. It kind of entails that you own some kind of domain. You own an agenda. You own a theme in the industry. And I think a really good way of thinking about that is instead of thinking that oh, we should have a blog space on our website or we should have a podcast with, you know, the company name on it, those kinds of initiatives are good. But again, if that is the outset of the content that you want to produce and the position that you want to take, it gets really hard because very soon once you put your logo on it—and it’s not that the logo should not be there—but if the logo is the outset, once you do that you fall again back into the component supplier mindset and all of the stuff you want to produce suddenly becomes very narrowly around the immediate surroundings of your product or service.
Instead, I want to provoke you. Now I want you to take in this mindset instead. I want you to think if you were not your company, if you were an industry magazine, a trade magazine, maybe even a magazine about the domain that you’re in. If you are a magazine, a printed magazine, what kinds of articles would be in that magazine? What kinds of content belong in that? What kinds of content are interesting for people who follow the magazine or who follow the industry? And what you can actually do is, if you have a trade magazine, go pick it up. If you have an industry magazine, an industry webpage, knowledge center, something like that, go pick up what they are actually producing stuff about because what you want to do is you want to become that magazine yourself. You want to become the medium, the industry medium where people from all over the industry come to your website, come to your social media, and get that inspiration to how we can push your industry forward.
This may sound a little bit fluffy, but I think the magazine mindset is pretty powerful because that is a completely different outset than the product one. And if you want to be a thought leader, you want to talk about all the things that have an impact on your industry and that is a lot of things. And some of those things might actually be quite far away from your actual product, but it still positions you as an expert in the industry. What it also entails is that instead of you only interviewing your own employees or your own internal partners or suppliers that you have in your supply chain, instead of just doing that you might also want to look out. Do we have any people outside of our own little sphere of stakeholders that we can interview? It could be researchers at universities. Often it’s quite easy to get an interview with a researcher because obviously they know a lot about what they do and it’s also part of their job to promote knowledge, right? So often that is a really powerful way of going and what it does to your content universe is it gives it credibility because it shows that you are connected with university professors, it shows that you are considerate about your own development, it shows that you know that you need research and you need deeply grounded research.
Okay, so go outside of your own little stakeholder zone and that really makes it a powerful content universe. Now just to make it a little bit more concrete, I have a few examples today because I think this shift is something that, in my experience, CMOs, maybe that’s you, CMOs, Chief Commercial Officers, CCOs, those kinds of people, marketing people in general, when they hear this approach, they generally applaud, generally they’re like, oh yeah, that is good, that was exactly what we thought, that was what we wanted to do, that is what we want to do. Yet when they have to sell in this idea into the company, into the rest of the company, it gets harder. And I do know this, but I think the magazine image or the metaphor, I hope that is a little bit useful.
And I want to give you some examples of just random industries that I’ve stumbled upon and random people that I’ve met and how you can position a company within the industry. So okay, here go the examples. If you are a Power2X provider, so you maybe have a design, a solution designed for Power2X, new technology, really cool. Instead of being clever about how Power2X works, why it’s good and all this, instead of having content about that, you might want to have that content, but if you want to position yourself as a thought leader in the industry, you shouldn’t only be talking about Power2X. You might want to own the domain or the agenda maybe called the future of energy, future of energy supply, or the future of green energy supply. So if you own that, then you suddenly become so much more interesting for people who are not deeply involved in Power2X, but who are involved in the energy sector as a whole.
Another example, if you sell water pipes, instead of having blog posts about materials, materials, instead of having blog posts about how you bend your pipes, that’s only interesting for people working at water pipe companies, basically your competitors. But if you create a content universe about the future of water management, for instance, you know, the sea levels are rising and with the sea level also comes more rain, so rain also means more water needs to be managed. So you can take the agenda, we need a safer future from water, we need to save cities from water, so water management in cities. I think that’s a brilliant thought leader concept that you can apply to your company and take ownership of that whole story. And I think that’s just so powerful because that attracts politicians, it attracts city planners, it attracts all kinds of people, and all of those are someone who can influence whether they choose your pipes or not, right?
Okay, if you have a general, another example, if you have a large company and you manufacture all kinds of things, so it’s all kinds of cool things, so that could be, well, I don’t even know, but all kinds of different engineering cool things that go into different sectors. A lot of companies do this. But if you do that, of course, it’s hard because you have different clients, maybe some are governmental clients, maybe some are private clients, so you have all kinds of different clients. It makes it really hard to narrow in on a specific type of person. Well, what you can do, imagine if you owned a place, a content universe, a magazine, if you were the one where people would go for the future of scientific discovery, right? What if you actually published all kinds of articles about all kinds of cool things, so you become Wired magazine, right? You become a competitor to Wired magazine, your website becomes a competitor to Wired magazine. What does that mean? It means that you suddenly have a whole array of people who just associate your brand with being someone who is at the forefront of technology, and that must be a brilliant place for an engineering, for a technology company to be in. It must be a brilliant place.
And of course, I would just like the last example I want to come up with is, of course, right now it makes a lot of sense to kind of have the green agenda within your industry, right? And obviously, there are many people taking the green agenda right now, but I still think especially in heavy industries and in heavy B2B industries, it’s not that prevalent yet. One thing that you want to of course consider if you choose the green agenda or the sustainability agenda in your industry is that you also need to have initiatives on your production lines that kind of, you know, follow that tail as well, right? You can’t have a this is how we become green not green at all in your production and not have any strategies in that direction, but I highly doubt that because ESG and reporting scope reporting on all this, it all points in one direction and most large companies they are taking the green agenda seriously.
So okay, let’s just have a few examples. If you produce concrete, you can of course say, okay, this is how we produce greener concrete and then have a really small content universe around that, but what you can also do is you can also take the agenda of saying how do we build green and that includes green buildings, green bridges, green bunkers, whatever it is that you use concrete for, all of this. How do we build green? And then have a whole content universe about that because if you do that then you suddenly because you’re on the radar, say architects, say building engineers, then suddenly you provide a space where they find it interesting to follow, right? And that in turn becomes a real asset for you because you might actually then be, you know, some of the architects might write on their, what’s it called, the paper, whatever they deliver, they would write on that hey, we want you to use this manufacturer because they know a lot about green stuff.
If you have solar panels, if that’s what you sell, my last example today, if you sell solar panels, that is inherently kind of green, right? So it should be. You can still talk about solar panels, but what you can also do is widen the scope a bit instead of talking about solar panels, talk about next generation energy, talk about how we meet all the different technologies that are needed to generate enough energy, right? Because solar panels won’t cut it alone and solar panel manufacturers know this of course it won’t, but what you can do is you can have a complete space filled with articles about solar panels, how they mix very well with wind turbines, how you can incorporate Power2X solutions to store surplus solar energy. All of this you can do and if you have that in your content space, well that space becomes so much more interesting for all of the very important stakeholders out there and you’ll get lots of reads on that and all of the value, all of the brand value will fall back on you.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, in my opinion at least, is what corporate thought leadership should be about: taking a larger agenda, owning a domain, owning an agenda within the industry, and then not focusing on your product. Close your eyes from your product. Think about what if I was an industry, what would I be writing about? That’s where the interesting thought leadership is. And that is also today’s content universe episode of the content universe, and I hope you did enjoy it because this was a kind of a long one, but I felt like I just really wanted to give some examples so it gets a little bit more concrete because otherwise it’s just really fluffy, right?
I hope guys and girls, I hope this really made sense to you and if it did, share it with someone, someone you know, someone who would be interested. And of course, it will land directly in my own inbox. So let me know what you think about this way of thinking about thought leadership. I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts and yeah, I think that’s it for today. Thank you so much for listening and see you on another planet in the content universe, guys.
