I’m probably going to tick off a lot of people, but my perspective is that brands have no business positioning themselves as thought leaders. One of the key characteristics of a thought leader is independence of thought – the fact that they are free to posit new directions and approaches unbounded by the constraints of marketing.

I don’t know where this idea came from that brands and companies can be “thought leaders.” That certainly wasn’t the view of Joel Kurtzman when he coined the term back in 1994. My understanding was that his interview subjects were individuals, not ...

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Thought leadership, almost by definition, is hard to achieve. Every business has competitors, and thought leadership implies that one or just a few firms "leads" a category. Nonetheless, the business purpose of thought leadership is that it allows a firm to engage prospects in a different way.

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