Thought Leadership Insights, Episode 5

In the fifth episode of Thought Leadership Insights, we speak to Parker Ward, Global Head of Digital and Content at Capgemini, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services. In this inspiring and engaging interview, Parker talks about his role as maestro of all things digital and content-driven at the 200,000 strong firm. He explains why thought leadership today requires new levels of strategic oversight together with digital focus, planning and rigour. Parker discusses in detail key factors essential to build a successful campaign, including content planning, formats, audience mapping and social media. Parker highlights the importance of good internal governance and gives his views on the always challenging question of ROI.

Topics covered

00:00 Introduction
02:00 Thought leadership at Capgemini
03:15 Using thought leadership to create separation in the marketplace
04:30 The importance of critical analysis
06:45 Listening to the clients
07:45 How to find the relevant space
09:40 Tailoring communications for an internal audience
10:50 How social media fits into a campaign
13:20 Utilising internal advocates
14:00 Building trust
15:40 Measuring ROI
19:00 How to apply funnel marketing
20:45 Company culture and formality in the B2B space
24:00 Treating your audience as individuals
25:20 Upcoming thought leadership trends

Listen to our other podcasts:

Episode 6: Rob Mitchell on successful thought leadership campaigns

Episode 4 | Episode 3 | Episode 2 | Episode 1

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Podcast Transcript

Interviewer: Welcome to the FT Longitude Thought Leadership Insights podcast, Parker.

Parker: Thank you. Good to be with you.

Interviewer: Yes, I’m very much looking forward to talking to you about your role at Capgemini, talking to you and getting some insights on how you approach thought leadership, and maybe also some reflections on the changing environment for thought leadership today and some advice and tips about how to develop and promote a good campaign.

Parker: Sound like a plan.

Interviewer: Tell me a little bit about your role, Parker.

Parker: My current title is Global Head of Digital and Content, which is a pretty fancy way of saying that I manage the teams that run all of our websites and social media channels, as well as the content strategy piece for marketing. Figuring out what kind of content we should produce, how we get it made, and then how do we publish it in the right way.

Interviewer: Right. Thought leadership has morphed, grown into, proliferated into content marketing, proliferated in different media and different styles of content. But it seems to be that the professional services consultancy companies, once upon a time, were really the leaders in this field. It emerges from their approach to communicate with clients and so forth. So this is clearly something that’s at the heart of what you do.

Parker: Thought leadership’s a priority for us at the group. It’s something that I feel is a bit of an anachronism left over from those early days of business consulting. There is traditions, big POV, white paper, usually in a locked PDF format. I still see that, not only in my company, but across the industry. It’s a huge, huge piece of what everybody’s doing. Now we’re moving into an area where trying to unlock that process, maybe break it up into smaller pieces and then still try and approach our clients and partners and stakeholders and even our sales force with this great stuff that helps us with all of those relationships.

Interviewer: Yes, and once upon a time, these would have been a report, a written report that was published and…

Parker: Still is.

Interviewer: in some cases uniquely. Now the underlying content can be used in so many different ways and the reports, to the extent they still are in PDF. Nonetheless, they’re often part of an underlying programme and these insights are parcelled and delivered in different media in different formats.

Parker: Yeah that’s exactly right. Especially in a service business like this, we’re all just trying to convince everybody that we’re professionally smarter than the other guy.

Interviewer: Yes.

Parker: Thought leadership is absolutely crucial to creating that separation in the marketplace, maybe deepening a relationship that you have with someone, maybe just making somebody sit up and think a little bit. When everybody is trying to do that same thing, there’s actually a real dearth of actual insight. So we have to actually look at the delivery mechanism, by which we’re delivering that insight. The executive class is getting older and a new generation is coming in. That old-school, printed-out, read-it-on-the-train-home PDF format’s not gonna cut it anymore.

One of the cool thing the Internet has done is given us what I call, “Infinite inventory.” There’s always another page to click to so we have to atomize that thought leadership into all of its smallest component parts and try and get it in these people’s feeds. That’s become big strategy for us, trying to figure out our production model and how we make that kind of stuff.

Interviewer: At FT Longitude, we often phrase it is that, “great thought leadership relies on robust research, analysis, and critical thinking and not just opinions.” The danger is, for the marketplace, and certainly in the whole content marketing, that bits of half opinions part of data that actually…Can you talk a little bit about the importance of the critical thinking and analysis that goes into the thought leadership.

Parker: Yeah, absolutely. We look at this a lot actually and it’s a bit of a cultural issue for us, to be honest. You have people who are absolutely brilliant in their field. As a consultant you’re paid to be professionally smart and they’re used to being taken at their word or their experience speaking for itself. But when it comes to content and an unknown audience who may not know you very well, who you are and what you’ve done is actually not as important as what you’re able to prove. My background is in journalism and editing, and there’s still the principle of, “If you’re gonna make a factual statement, you should have three corroborated sources to back it up.” The best journalist in the world, who’s been covering a subject for 30 years, they still have to do that every time they write something. Who they are doesn’t matter. What they write actually matters.

We’ve actually done our own internal research to prove this back to our own organisation because we were getting a little pushback. I’ve seen it in other industries too. That said, people are interested in branded content, but you have to prove what you’re saying. You have to actually point to specific research that maybe isn’t your own. You might have to start getting comfortable with that. You have to bear it out. These short POV or opinion papers, I think a lot of blogging goes too far into this world, I just don’t think are gonna create that sense of trust or believability or even the separation in the marketplace because everybody’s got an opinion. That’s how we’re kind of approaching it.

Interviewer: Right. It points again to the importance of this robust research and being clear what it is you want to talk about, in a way. What is germane linked to the objective of your clients.

Parker: Yes. We always have to start somewhere. I think a lot of research just casts around, looking for anything interesting to say, but it you don’t have a pretty strong thesis there’s a strong chance you won’t actually go anywhere with the research. We spend lot o...