Clicks, shares, likes, views, dwell times, share of voice, downloads, and impressions—the usual suspects—went into the melting pot. I’m sure there were more. When it comes to brand and marketing performance, especially in the digital realm, it’s only natural to grab onto what’s readily available: hard, cold, data-driven facts. But these facts (or metrics, more to the point) can’t tell us the extent to which the content in question has a lasting impact on its desired audience.

To get a measure of this (excuse the pun), and because we’re a curious bunch at Source, we recently surveyed some 3,800 buyers of consulting services globally about their views and the actions they take when thought leadership lands in their inbox. What they told us was illuminating.

90% of CxOs consume thought leadership “often” or “sometimes.”

Granted, it might not keep them up at night, but the C-suite is certainly consuming thought leadership. Perhaps it’s fair to say that the (boardroom) table stakes just got raised. Whether it’s because a thirst for knowledge is simply part of a CEO’s DNA or because relevant and timely thought leadership provides a haven in times of permacrisis, this propensity to consume surely feels like validation.

69% of buyers say they could not recall a specific piece of stand-out thought leadership they had read in the last 12 months.

That doesn’t sound great, and immediately, the adage “we give with one hand and take with the other” springs to mind. If the thought leadership firms produce is highly relevant, engaging, and frequently consumed, why can’t senior executives remember it? Could lack of differentiation be the culprit here, whereby thought leadership covering the same topics bobs around in a sea of sameness, never bound for clear blue water? Pushing for greater specificity around target audiences, doubling down on content themes authentic to brand strengths, and always putting quality over quantity could help overcome this recall challenge.

41% of CxOs implement recommendations from a piece of memorable thought leadership.

Good thought leadership drives positive action, and better still, several actions (even more reason to labour over actionable recommendations). Of all senior executives, CxOs are most likely (in order of priority) to implement the recommendations in the piece, bookmark the content for future reference, have a meeting with the firm that publishes the content, or buy that firm’s services.

The sociologist William Bruce Cameron once said of his field, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”* He was reflecting on how convenient it would be if you could structure and analyse human behaviour using computer programs, in the way economists can—but he knew that the numbers would only take him so far, and the sphere of thought leadership is no different. Just because we can measure something, such as clicks or impressions, it doesn’t mean we should, especially when it comes to measuring audience impact. Here we should only measure what really counts.

If you’d like to learn more about client perceptions of thought leadership, you can download an extract of our latest White Space report. Or get in touch; we’d be delighted to discuss the findings with you further.

*Postscript: This quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein by mistake, which caught me out. Apparently, Einstein wasn’t associated with the saying until 1986, more than 30 years after his death in 1955. The text first appeared in Cameron’s “Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking” in 1963.