I'm James Redgrave, Vice President of Thought Leadership and Editorial at State Street. I work as part of the thought leadership team, and we aim to provide mostly research-based thought leadership - content written, recorded, whatever it might be - for our clients. We focus less on our own services and product marketing, and more on demonstrating an understanding of the clients' industries and markets and their preoccupations. We hope to give them some valuable insights into how their own organisations are positioned and where their peers and their clients are as well.
I think the key distinction between B2B marketing as opposed to D2C marketing is that the vast majority of your clients or stakeholders have clients and stakeholders of their own. Obviously if you're marketing a consumer product to a consumer, that consumer thinks about what they want and what they like. Whereas an asset manager, for example, has its own range of institutional and retail clients, and an asset owner has its members.
What we tend to think about is that our clients and network of stakeholders are organisations who have their own marketing departments and their own need to communicate and get information out to a wide range of people.
The way I view this is that we ought to be helping our clients with their own marketing, their own thought leadership, their own content efforts. We're either giving them a platform where they can demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of their clients' preoccupations, or we're providing them with research and data analysis-based information which they can feed on through. We're thinking a step beyond our own clients to that broader ecosystem - their clients, their pension fund members, their ecosystems as it were.
We try to put ourselves in the client's position and think about what they need to know to position themselves in their own industries and markets, and how we can help them do that.
When we're benchmarking our clients against their peers through our research and data, we have to avoid gerrymandering outcomes that we want or that we think our clients might want. There's a certain element of hard truth-telling involved in this kind of research.
For example, we run annual surveys on digital assets and emerging technology, and on private markets and illiquid assets. There's obviously strong demand out there in the industry to see various things happen in these markets - the propensity for digital assets and blockchain-based assets to become mainstream quickly, and for the industry to reap all the benefits they expect from those technologies.
Within private markets, there's been a long-term push towards bringing new investors into the space and getting a different investor profile - more individual, high net worth, quasi-retail type investors, DC fund investors. Generally speaking, when we do this research, the feedback we get is that the pace of change the industry anticipates is not the same as how long they want it to take - it's a much longer timeframe.
There's a desire in the industry for everyone to think this is going to happen tomorrow. People raise eyebrows when we say, "This isn't us talking here, but the industry is telling us they think this is more than 10 years off." It's not the two to three year horizon that a lot of the more boosterish organisations are saying. We don't take a view on the accuracy of that data - we're reporting back to the industry what the industry is telling us. But it does tend to break with the more conventional narratives in those spaces.
From my earliest days at State Street, we've always run these big information campaigns based on speaking to the industry and getting their views. Funnily enough, the editorial culture was quite set when I joined - it's one of the things that attracted me to the role in the organisation was the quasi-journalistic nature of it. One thing that I think happened coterminously with my joining was that we started to use this in a much more targeted way.
We went from just getting this information back, having these conversations and publishing white papers, blogs, articles, doing a couple of webinars or podcasts and sending it out into the world, to thinking a lot more about how we can get this directly in front of the client and how we can speak to them about it. We moved to a more pseudo-consultancy model where, in addition to the publications, we're cutting this data by respondent type - showing different types of organisation, different types of executive respondent, different geographic regions and countries.
Then we're going out to our client-facing people and saying, "Look, this isn't just a massive survey and a report. If you've got a client who's asked about this subtopic of a big theme, and they're a European asset manager and they want to know what other European asset managers of the same sort of AUM are doing, or they want to know what other technology specialists are doing - we can drill down into that." We can either equip you to have a conversation with them, or we can come along to the client meetings.
What we can do is use our thought leadership not just as published materials, but as a direct-to-client conversation piece. That's proved to be something our clients have valued. There's been a shift from thinking about this as material for publication to thinking about it as material for client conversations.
What we can do is use our thought leadership not just as published materials, but as a direct-to-client conversation piece
It's very much about knowing your client, not in the regulatory sense, but understanding that individual within the organisation. Someone in our sales or relationship management teams might see something we've produced and think, "So-and-so would be interested in that because they mentioned it." So let's drill down into the data and create a more bespoke conversation. Or if we know an organisation publishes a lot on a subject, let's get in front of a panel of their executives and present data to them. Let's get them involved in our next round of interviews or roundtables because we know they'll have interesting things to say.
We're turning a spreadsheet full of thousands of data points into a deck full of merely hundreds of data points, into a conversation between two individuals who know each other and know what each other wants to talk about. That's the funnelling down from the impersonal to the personal that I think is an important part of our thought leadership strategy.
There are a couple of strands to that. Firstly, there's the obvious switch towards more digital distribution platforms and the move from long-form to short-form, and from written to recorded content. The technology facilitates a much greater ability to put out podcasts, webinars, etc., with people from all over the world joining if necessary. It used to be if you wanted to publish the results of a conversation between half a dozen different people, you had to get them in a room - now you very much don't.
All the data we get from our digital marketing analysis suggests that people increasingly consume shorter-form pieces. So we've shifted from doing research and publishing a paper or series of papers - though we still do that and I think they still have more value than people give them credit for - to having a whole flotilla of shorter pieces, blogs putting out individual themes and points, and more verbal content as well.
But there's an element of knowing who you're sending stuff to because there are still people out there who will, if they trust the source, set aside time to read something longer. Fundamentally, we're dealing with intelligent and sophisticated people in complicated markets. There's only so much you can give someone in snapshot form in this industry - sometimes you do have to get detailed and construct a more complex thesis based on larger volumes of data. So I think the narrative of the long-form report dying is a little overdone. But certainly you do need to arrest people's attention with the shorter stuff as well.
I think the narrative of the long-form report dying is a little overdone
The biggest thing people are really grappling with is audience segmentation. For example, two or three years ago when I took over our digital assets and emerging technology work, we realised we were writing about tokenisation, blockchain, converting capital markets assets into tokens, plus the cryptocurrency side - and the variety of sophistication of our audience was huge. You had companies who were already involved and had brought in teams of people with chief technology officers who were on board with this. But then you were also sending it to executives thinking "What is this? What does it mean for me?"
You can't send an article on what fundamentally is a blockchain to the CTO of a digital asset manager - they'll know it already and think we're talking at a level far below what they want to read. Equally, you can't send something highly complicated about node management and the interrelationship of on and off-chain ramps to the chief operating officer of a pension fund whose initial thought is "What is this in the first place?"
A lot of effort goes into getting this right. Some of it is automated and based on job titles, but a lot of it is simply based on the fact that individuals within our organisation know individuals there. We're trying to make sure we're not talking down to people who understand the stuff we're sending out, or underselling ourselves to people who don't.
Digital technology is a fairly extreme example, but across everything, not everything you put out will be right for everyone whose contact details you happen to have. Not every client wants to hear about everything. And if you spam people with stuff they're not interested in, it doesn't matter whether you're sending them long-form, short-form, audio, video, written, whatever - they will stop reading if the subject matter isn't relevant. That's something we've given a lot more consideration to over the several years I've been at State Street.
I think what I said before about internal pushback against the idea that everything has to be very short - fighting that case is important. My boss, our Global Head of Thought Leadership, is a big advocate for this: some of the stuff you put out has to have gravitas. Thought leadership is partly about positioning your organisation within the market as somebody who understands deep, complex things. You can't do that with a series of 300-word blogs. Even if relatively few people read it, the people who do need to think "these people have a sophisticated understanding of this stuff."
That's definitely a challenge I put to the people who simply read the data that says people on average last 30 seconds on a page. Even if only 10 people last an hour on a page or in a PDF, those 10 people could be worth having as readers if they are the chief executive officers, operating officers, investment officers of important clients.
When I talked about the shift from using thought leadership as purely impersonal publication to more personal communication with individual clients or small groups of clients, there was an element of needing to persuade people within marketing that this was a good use of time. We had to persuade the salespeople and relationship people that it was worth getting us in front of their clients. There was a bit of an advocacy process involved in justifying the time and effort it takes to create a direct-to-client communications channel. Having got it, it's now very much ingrained into our process. People expect annual updates from us and frequent updates throughout the year on different things we're doing. It's quite easy now, but at the beginning it was more a question of "who are these people? Why do I need to come on a call with them?" We had to justify ourselves in that respect.
Ecosystems.
It goes back to understanding that your client profile in B2B is very different from D2C. People don't have - somebody choosing between two different brands of chocolate bar doesn't then worry about what they're going to do with that chocolate bar down the line. They're interested in the chocolate bar for themselves. Somebody engaging with your technology services, your data services, your outsourcing services, is doing so because they're thinking about how this is going to help someone else, specifically their client. If you don't take that extra step down the line, then you're not effectively serving your clients in the B2B environment.
Make sure - and this goes whether you're dealing with internal stakeholders or if you find yourself in a role like mine where you occasionally speak directly to clients - to bear in mind that you're being judged on your ability to synthesise insights into reasonably complicated subjects. I'm talking about financial services here, but this will go for other industries as well.
Horrible cliché though it is, there's the whole "no second chance at a first impression" thing. If you go in there and you don't demonstrate that you have personal knowledge of the subject matter - this may be something you glean from a bit of desk research immediately before, or it may be something that you've immersed yourself in over the years, it doesn't really matter - you have to be able to demonstrate that you can come up to snuff in terms of understanding these things.
Because the next time you get in front of that internal stakeholder, if you didn't impress them sufficiently with your knowledge and understanding, they're not going to be open to what you have to say in future. And that goes double if you're let loose in front of a client. So understand the areas of the market which you're responsible for covering. Read what your competitors are publishing, read what the various research and thought leadership consultancies and agencies are putting out. Read the press and just make sure that you're not caught short in terms of knowing what the latest developments are in the industries or market areas you're covering.
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