The thought leadership gap
Ask a room full of engineers to identify the leading voice in their field and they will name a person, not a company. Here, Richard Stone, founder of automation PR agency Stone Junction, explains why that distinction is more important than ever, and what the research says genuine thought leadership is really all about in 2026.
The rise of AI-generated content has made output cheaper and differentiation harder, while buying groups have only grown larger and more cautious. Most marketing teams have responded by producing more content, but all the research suggests that’s the wrong answer.
In late 2025, Martin Sorrell, the owner of the world’s largest advertising and marketing holding company WPP, which can boast industry giants such as Ogilvy amongst its member companies, claimed that PR in 2026 would be about ‘flooding the internet’. He was very, very wrong.
According to the Answer Engine: State of B2B Thought Leadership in 2026, which surveyed 797 senior-level B2B marketers in the US and UK, 97 per cent say thought leadership is critical to sales success.
However, only 43 per cent extend it beyond acquisition to engage and retain customers post-sale. Most teams treat it as a top-of-funnel awareness tactic and then stop. The research consistently shows that this results in lower return on investment, compared to a strategy that actively employs content and coverage to engage existing customers.
Most teams treat it as a top-of-funnel awareness tactic and then stop.
Nearly three quarters of B2B buyers say thought leadership gives them a more reliable read on a supplier’s competence than anything that the supplier says about itself. The same proportion say it has sent them researching something they had never previously considered buying.
If you are selling into technical markets where deals take months and sign-off involves a room full of sceptics, I would suggest that thought leading content marketing deserves more of your budget than it currently gets.
So, what does effective thought leadership actually look like? The study is pretty specific, which is helpful given that the term gets applied to everything from a LinkedIn update to a peer-reviewed paper. I’ve also encountered it being used as a singular noun recently, which is not a good look.
The clearest finding is that original research sits at the heart of most high-performing programmes. Nearly half of the marketers using it describe it as very effective at driving engagement and leads, which is a high bar for B2B content.
the best examples use third party expert to validate their thinking and multi-channel distribution to reach as many relevant people as possible. Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing, put it well: “The combination of original research with a system for building trusted, multi-channel content experiences, that are measurable, is where leaders are pulling away from the pack.”
Marketers who regularly involve industry specialists report that their content is ‘very effective’ at nearly three times the rate of those who don’t. That’s a big gap and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Don’t be confused by thought leadership
Research like this is useful for building internal consensus around thought leadership investment. It gives marketers the language to push back on decisions that default to product-led advertising. What it can’t capture is why so many programmes fail despite the good intentions behind them.
In my experience, the most common problem isn’t unwillingness to invest. It’s a genuine confusion about what thought leadership means. Most companies treat it as a volume exercise; produce enough content, cover enough topics, maintain enough of a presence and that should be enough.
The result of that tends to be a library of technically accurate material that reads identically to the library maintained by every competitor in the sector.
The brief needs to be a bit more demanding. It means finding the people inside the business who hold views that run against conventional wisdom and giving them a platform, rather than a communications handler whose job is to sand everything down to approved messaging.
I’ve seen companies with world-leading technical capability produce content that felt like it had been written by a committee with a legal disclaimer policy. I’ve also seen companies with a fraction of that capability build real market authority because they were willing to say something specific and defend it.
That’s what the 74 per cent effectiveness rate for expert-led original research is really pointing to. Getting there is an editorial decision, not an infrastructure one.
How to run a thought leadership campaign
Original research, in the sense the study describes, means finding out something that neither you nor your competitors currently know and publishing what you find, even when the findings are inconvenient. This is very different from aggregating existing industry data and adding your logo.
Most science and engineering companies also underuse what they produce. A well-constructed research report can generate media coverage, a conference panel, a short-form video series, by-lined articles for trade press and social assets carrying a consistent narrative across several months. Many companies produce the report and consider the job done.
If you’re wondering where to start, commission research around a question your customers are actually arguing about, and not the one you already know the answer to. Publish what you find and treat the findings as the beginning of a conversation rather than a press release.
The data suggests that the companies doing this are pulling away from those that aren’t. Based on what we see with our own clients, I’d say that’s about right.
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