Christina intro (00:00)

Today we’re talking about thought leadership. If you want your business to have better visibility, you have to understand what thought leadership is and how to create it. But here’s the thing, I’m not going to give you a list of 25 thought leadership trends because that’s not what you need. What you’re probably looking for is a framework behind how to stand out in your market. If you’re not sure how to get started,

Here’s the secret to crafting thought leadership that people actually remember. This is A Mind For Marketing. I’m Christina Moore, helping businesses connect with more prospects through content.

It’s 1995, New York City. Mark Levy, a writer fresh off of a decade long break, is cranking out articles on TV and

Mark Levy (01:01)

So my name is Mark Levy and I’m a differentiation expert.

Christina intro (01:07)

To handle the pressure, he turns to a tool created by Peter Elbow called free writing. No rules, no editing, just dumping thoughts onto the page as fast as they come. It wasn’t polished, but it worked. And something unexpected happened. He started solving problems, not just on paper, but in his actual

As Mark put it, he accidentally became his own consultant. That light bulb moment kicked off his mission to help people tap into their best ideas, even if they don’t think of themselves as creative.

Mark Levy (01:46)

So I differentiate organizations, brands and thought leaders around a big sexy idea, a signature idea, an idea they’re going to be known for throughout the marketplace.

And I make sure it comes through loud and clear in everything they do, like in their web copy, their blog posts, their speeches, their pitches, like internal documents and so forth, so that anyone out there who falls in love with that idea and wants that idea in their own lives has to seek my client out. Because my client embodies that idea, they represent that idea in people’s minds. If people tried to get that idea from someone other than my client, they’d be getting kind of a diet version of the idea. They’d be getting a stinky, a helpful version of the idea. So for full potency, they have to go to my client. So that’s what I do for a living. What’s this thing that’s going to make your thought leadership or your brand or your product or your leadership initiative or whatever it is you’re doing, what’s going to make it pop? What’s going to make people not be able to forget it and not they they’re just going to talk about it. They’re going to evangelize around it. That’s what I do.

Christina interview (03:06)

How to be the Coca-Cola and not the knockoff own brand in the supermarket.

Mark Levy (03:10)

Right, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and if you’re the knockoff brand, what’s your best shot at making things happen, understanding that you’re the knockoff brand? Yeah. Right, exactly. The best knockoff friend you can be. Right, exactly.

Christina interview (03:22)

Sure, sure. I to be the best knockoff brand, the best dupe the best juke you can be.

Mark Levy (03:30)

Absolutely. If you’re in a commodity market, what is it that can make you stand

Christina interview (03:34)

Mm-hmm.

Christina links (03:37)

Every business has the ambition of being able to differentiate, but most, like me, get caught in the day to day. After your brain has spent all day switching from one persona to the next, I bet you’re exhausted and don’t want to face the genius level thinking it takes to differentiate and become a thought leader. But maybe you don’t have to. I asked Mark, what would he advise on setting yourself up?

To focus and switch from operational to creative or imaginative thinking.

Mark Levy (04:12)

Yeah, great.

So it’s the idea of most of our jobs are not predominantly creative most of the time. In other words, even a creative’s job, they’re not being creative most of the time. They’re doing paperwork, and they’re doing all kinds of things like that. And so it’s really hard to get yourself into a creative mindset when you’ve just been doing some rote kind of thing that has no creativity. And so the answer that I had come up with it, I used to teach these organizations what I called a thinking campaign. And so what that was, was essentially taking the project that they needed to create around, in that case, brands or products or services, but it can be your thought leadership, it can be whatever it is.

And to actually, I’ll put it this way, it’s hard to get the factory to produce from a standstill. So my belief was that you should never close the factory, that the idea factory should always be humming even at a lower level before you ramp it up. So I would have people write and think and discuss creative ideas every single day. So the pump was always primed. Sometimes when they were home, they would do writing, they would do thinking about what it was they had to create beforehand. So to put it in even a different way, it was like they would often come into the brainstorm with ideas that they had already formulated because they had already put in a lot of research and thinking and creativity into the stuff. So creativity was never far away from them.

So when you’re doing things and you let creativity recede into the background, it’s hard to get it back. It reminds me something, a short story writer years ago, her name was Lou Willett Stanek. And Lou Willett Stanek in a book of hers said, stories happen to the people who can tell them. And so the way I interpreted it is stories happen to you.

If you need stories, you start to see the world in story, you start connecting things together that you normally wouldn’t be connecting together if you didn’t need stories. So what it is I’m saying is that your creativity, your storytelling, your thought leadership, all the things that you’re trying to strengthen should never recede that it’s got to be part of the daily work and never recede too far in the background.

Otherwise you’re starting from a standstill and it’s just too much effort to get it working again.

Christina interview (07:00)

Yeah, that really, really resonates with me. Know, story banking is like the key to making a podcast. Like if you want to introduce storytelling into making a podcast, make sure you’re always collecting those stories. What’s happening throughout your day.

Mark Levy (07:16)

I love that. Yeah, well, I actually have clients, and I’m sure you do this too. It’s strange to me because I grew up as a writer. I have a degree in writing. I taught writing. I’ve written.

But I’m also a magician. I’ve been a magician. I’ve created magic shows and tricks that have been on TV, all over the.

Was so steeped in story growing up from magic and writing that I didn’t realize that when I got into the business world, it would be so difficult for people to even identify story. So the way I teach them storytelling, I sometimes, what I’m about to say right now, sometimes when I’m working with clients, I’m saying, this is the most long lasting, helpful thing I’m gonna tell you in our entire engagement. Like, we’ll come up with cool stuff right here, right now, but this is the thing that’s gonna transform your business more than anything else, is that you need to walk around in story, like looking for stories and seeing what stands out to you in the world and understanding why it stands out, even if it doesn’t seem like a fully fledged story, quote unquote, whatever resonates to you, something you see on a shelf in a store, something when you’re walking in nature or whatnot, you need to write this stuff down and put it in a file because you never know when you’re going to be writing something or creating something or pitching something.

And you just dip into your file and because you’ve taken the time to squirrel away these stories, it’s like, that’s exactly. And by the way, one thing I didn’t mention is when I write down these stories, I will often write down a provisional lesson that the story is teaching, even though I’m open to the story being about something other than the lesson I first wrote down.

And to kind of understand what meaning do they have for you in the moment. As you start walking around collecting stories and derive meaning from them, saying this is what this means to me, that’s when you come up with your best ideas. So.

What I normally find people do is they have some commoditized idea that they want to get out there in some way, like some leadership idea or something like that. And they want a story to illustrate it. Like it’s a very like instructional manual, like from a piece of technology. It’s like, I have this idea, which sucks. And I want to support that idea with a great.

In looking for stories to support the idea, they’re just looking for commoditized stories that everyone else has used and the stories have no freshness to them. So to me, walking around, in story, like living in story and living in truth and walking around and seeing the truth of things and writing that down, you will derive lessons from it and now you lead with that lesson and then you say, let me tell you how I came up with that lesson and then you tell the story and it works perfectly as opposed to the other very awkward, you know, commoditized way. Does that make sense the way I put it?

Christina interview (10:47)

It does. And actually that kind of sparked my curiosity because what I think you’re saying is instead of coming up with an idea and then trying to shoehorn some sort of revisit your stories. What lessons did you learn from them? And then how could that be of interest to your audience?

Mark Levy (11:16)

100%. And if this sounds like a small thing, like a tactical thing, anyone listening, it’s like, OK, it’s a small tactical. This means everything. For you to stand out and get your ideas out there and communicate your ideas out there in a big, big way that makes people remember them, this, you should watch this five times over, this first part, especially your beautiful summing up of it.

Like, because this just means everything in being able to do that. That you live your life, you live in truth, you see stories, you write them down, you think about what they could mean, and then those ideas become your thought leadership or become parts of what it is that you’re doing, rather than grabbing someone else’s stale idea and someone’s story stitching them together in a way that’s really awkward.

In the work I do, whether it’s differentiation or writing or speaking, platform speaking, all the different things I do, I always follow this edict.

Christina links (12:26)

After exploring how personal stories can shape meaningful thought leadership, we go on to discuss hooking the audience and what lessons we can borrow from creative people in other areas. One of them was Elmore Leonard, the American crime writer behind hits like Jackie Brown and Out of Sight. He passed away in 2013 at the age of 87, but left behind a legacy of sharp unforgettable storytelling and a small but mighty golden rule.

Mark Levy (13:00)

Some reporter once asked him, Leonard, how do you write such page turning novels, you know, where people can’t wait to like read everything they’re so consumed? And he said, I leave out the parts that people would skip.

And so to me, that’s an actual design parameter that if I’m reading something and anyone who works with me knows I read everything aloud, if something is not serving its purpose, then it goes.

So I get tons of stuff sent to me by clients and other people, like books and so forth. I do this in a very loving way when they ask me to comment on them. They open whatever they’re writing with a lot of throat clearing, you know, kind of, is this mic on? You know, like ding, ding, is this mic on? Like they’re setting the scene, they’re doing all these things. And I say to them, here’s how I’m reading this. And again, I’m very supportive. I don’t want to make it sound like I’m some brutal guy or whatnot. But I said, here’s how I’m reading your thing. I’m going, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

Christina interview (13:50)

That’s so… Yeah.

Hmm.

Ha!

Mark Levy (14:12)

Here’s, and I say, start here. Because everything else, I’m just going bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. But in today’s world, that’s why Instagram posts and other things are so brutally cut down. Because people understood from algorithms what writers and performers inherently knew that you can only start slow in some kind of.

Christina interview (14:15)

Great.

Mark Levy (14:38)

Beautiful novel or lyrical piece of writing, then it’s totally appropriate. You know, if you’re William Faulkner or something, it’s fine to sit scene and be slow or whatnot. But if you’re writing some piece of marketing copy, like you got to start fast because people aren’t going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Christina interview (14:57)

Yeah, you’ve got seconds to win them or lose them when it comes to short form content online.

Mark Levy (15:00)

Right?

Christina interview (15:03)

So in your book, you advise sharing your unfinished ideation. What’s the purpose of that?

Mark Levy (15:11)

Right, so sharing the ideas that you have, your unfinished thoughts, your half-formed ideas, for some people, this is not for everyone, but for some people, it’s a wonderful way to create something far more robust and interesting. Again, this is just something that I’ve noticed.

So depending on the situation you’re in, first, taking your idea and having to articulate it in a way that makes sense to other people helps you form new information around that idea. So the mere act of having to articulate it is going to force you to create meaning around it and articulated meaning around it. So instantly, you have amazing benefit from just having to put it in a form where you have to share it. That said, you don’t want to put it in a form where you’re corrupting it or bastardizing it or dumbing it down.

In order you’re not trying to impress other people, you have to go to the right kinds of people who know you and want the best for you and whose opinions and thinking you respect and talk to them, say, I have like an idea that I’m working on that I’d love to run by you and your opinion. And then you can tell them the idea is this. And you can tell them the story of your

Christina links (16:46)

Quick pause, if you want people to trust your ideas and listen to what you have to say, we’ve made a short assessment called, Are You Ready to Lead the Conversation? It shows how your content is doing and how you can make it even better. The link’s in the episode description. Now back to the interview.

So now you shared your half-formed ideas, kicked them around and built up a solid stash of stories, sparks and lessons learned. Great. But what do you actually use when it’s time to pitch, present or stand on stage? That’s where Levy shifts gear from generating ideas to picking the ones that pack the biggest punch.

Christina interview (17:35)

I want to backtrack slightly to where after you’ve collected the stories of which I guess over a period of time there would be many. What would be your next step? How would you then sort through, you know, the ones that have legs?

Mark Levy (17:54)

Sure. So again, I have very unusual ways that I do things because I come from the world of the magician and the writer, even though I’m a business.

I tell people the first thing you want to do, let’s say you have a presentation to give about an idea, it’s a speech or it’s a pitch or whatever it is, the first thing I want you to do is not gather information out of obligation because we often put things down in a way where it’s like well it’s essential that I say this.

No, it’s not. It’s not essential that you say. You have to be excited about what it is you’re saying. And because if you’re excited by it, if it’s stuff that you really want to say and show people, and you’re excited to do it, that excitement will be catching by the other person. They’ll get really excited. So and again, this comes kind of from my background as, let’s say, being a magician.

So a magician will have a show and their show may have a theme. And so you think, the magician had a theme and then he created all these tricks to fit the theme. That is usually not the case that it ever happens. The magician usually says, OK, I need to launch a show. What’s the coolest stuff that I’m most excited to do right now? And they gather all those tricks there.

And then they say, what’s the theme that’s coming to me from all these tricks? Okay, that’s gonna be the theme of this show. And now, how can I earn the right to do these tricks under those themes? And some of the tricks will be cut out, others will be added, but it’s almost always letting the real things create the enthusiasm rather than the dry conceptual obligation ideas creating.

The enthusiasm, right? But it’s the same thing if you’re selling a product or a service. I mean, I’ve helped companies make hundreds of billions of dollars from these things. It’s the same thing. It’s what about this product that people are going to see it and they’re going to go no fucking way. Like, are you kidding me? And like, it’s that strong.

You’re looking for that moment. And by the way, if your product or service doesn’t have that no fucking way moment, you may need to rethink what it is you’re doing. You may need to recreate your product or service because really everything needs a no fucking way moment.

It’s the same thing with whatever your product is or whatever your service is or your thought leadership or your book or whatnot. Like you need to have something that would elicit that kind of spontaneous response from someone when they’re hearing it. So they’re not just going, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to go, what?

Christina interview (20:55)

What I really like is that you’ve actually used your own techniques within setting up to illustrate that point as well.

Mark Levy (21:02)

So there’s always when we’re walking around, you could call them lean in moments. Know, when people, when what you’re saying, when you’re showing them a product or a service, or you’re talking about your concept or whatever it is, where they go, no, you know, like they’re leaning in, like they go. And so,

You’re kind of workshopping or prototyping your ideas as you’re living the day, all I’m saying is to note them. So note reactions, note big emotional reactions in when things happen, but also in other people. Wow, that person really got excited or they really got angry or something. Why was that? Because there might be something very important.

Christina interview (21:43)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s what’s quite interesting is that you said also they might be angry, but the point is to pay attention to how it elicits emotion.

Mark Levy (21:53)

That’s right. That’s right. Right. You’re looking for moments of extreme emotion within you or others during the day and saying, what created that? Because I can almost guarantee you there’s a story there you can use in some capacity in your work somewhere.

It’s not like some kind of thing. It’s just, I thought that was interesting. So if I think it’s interesting, other people might find it interesting.

Christina interview (22:20)

And it’s inevitable that somebody will. And it’s kind of like when a lot of people ask me, you know, will anyone listen to my podcast? And it’s kind of like, yes, there are other people like you in the world. That’s fine. You just have you have to put it out there so that they can discover you and they’re looking for you too.

Mark Levy (22:44)

This was beautifully illustrated to me about two weeks ago.

I love outdoor sculpture. That’s one of my favorite types of sculpture, because you come upon it and it’s always surprising. Like, you you’re walking around and you turn the corner and it’s like, whoa, what’s that?

And so I had heard that there was an artist who had created a 21-foot tall pigeon, realistic looking outdoor, like realistic. And it’s 21 feet tall or long. It’s called

And it’s because he made it the dimensions that a T-Rex would have been. T-Rexes were about 21 feet long. So he took this innocuous thing that you ignore.

That’s just walking around and gave it the size of a T-Rex. And so it’s in Manhattan now, the statue monster on this thing called the High Line. Of those of you know Manhattan, it’s essentially a park that’s on a raised subway platform that runs about two miles on the west side of the city. It’s a gorgeous.

So my wife and I went up the stairs to see Monster, to see this pigeon statue, and I thought it was very cold out and rainy out, even though there’s just a couple of, like a cold stretch had come, it very gray and rainy out. And so I thought there would just be a handful of people up there, you know, like, cause just walking around. But it was a madhouse, it was a mob scene.

Like it was so crowded that there were security up there to move. You had to scrunch your shoulders up to get through the crowd. Like there were thousands of people up on this elevated subway platform. And I was wondering, why are they all here? And I looked up and they were all online waiting to get in some to something called Pigeon Fest.

Whatever it is that you’re doing there is an audience for it. I don’t care how counter you think it is. There are people who want to know what it is that you’re doing. They’re going to be excited by it.

Christina interview (24:53)

Would you take that really enthusiastic idea and then incorporate that into the brand?

Mark Levy (25:05)

Depends if it’s the dominant idea, if it’s what I call the big sexy idea, that has to be the lead in everything you do.

I’ll tell you another metaphor or story very, quickly. It’s that if people remember old school albums and, you know, like record albums or so forth. So I used to think like, what is the job of the single? You know, the song that’s picked is the single off the album because you have the artist, you have the album and there are songs on the album, but they’re singles.

Like, so I used to wonder, what’s the job of the single? The single’s already on the album. Why did they release a single? Like, it doesn’t make sense. Why would you take something that’s already on the album and release it as a single? And then I realized that those singles did missionary work for the album. That they, right, that they went out into the world. There were people who didn’t really care about the artist. And there were people…

We didn’t want to pay all that money or devote that time to get 12 songs on the album, again, old school. But a single could penetrate the market in ways that the artist and the album could not. So you would hear it at carnivals, you’d hear it on radios, you’d hear like everywhere, you know, like all over the place. So the single, again, could convert people, like it could be a missionary for the artist and the album.

Christina links (26:40)

Levy doubles down on this concept, that missionary piece of work. It reminds him of a story about a professor and researcher named Jim Collins at Stanford University. In the early 2000s, Collins released a book called Built to Last. It got him some notoriety.

Mark Levy (27:03)

But then he came out with a book called Good to Great, which was a mega, mega selling business book. And anyone who was in business when Good to Great came out knows Good to Great because, for this reason, Jim Collins is the artist.

The album was Good to Great, but there were singles, there were ideas in this book that Jim Collins on purpose gave names to. He wrote about them in chapters by themselves or sub chapters. He would speak about these ideas over other ideas. So essentially he was giving, he was creating like an album saying like,

Good to Great is the album. There’s lots of music on here, but here are the things that I think would make good singles. And so he’d write and speak about these things. And if you were around at the time, you know the names of all these quote unquote singles. They get the right people on the bus, you know, the hedgehog concept, the flywheel, level five leadership.

It’s not an endless number of things. He had like five singles on that album that he purposely named and sent out into the world. So when I’m saying with your thought leadership, you have a dominant idea, you have this thing that you’re about, your big sexy idea, but it doesn’t mean that you corrupt yourself and dumb yourself down and you’re not about other things. It’s like you take your other stories and your other ideas, you’re saying,

What’s the emblematic one? What’s the main one that’s going to get people’s attention? And then what are my deep tracks? Like, you know, deep album cut tracks, like they’re there. But what are the emissaries? What are my singles? And what are the order? Like, what do I think’s my best single after my differentiation and so forth? Does that make sense? I know I’m being very metaphorically, but I mean it in a very tangible way. That’s exactly how I think about it.

Christina interview (28:59)

Perfect. Nope. Perfect analogy. That was like the concept of the album and the singles. And I think actually it still applies today. So artists, even though everything is streamed, artists still release singles, right? They still release things that either are going to be suitable for the summer or suitable for, like very seasonal, but then they do want you to go back and listen to the entire album. So I think that analogy still very much works today. Yeah.

Mark Levy (29:16)

That’s right. Right? Exactly. Exactly. Well, and if you like the single, you’re more likely to then buy the album or to check out the artist. That’s like the big key. The singles not just the standalone thing. It’s like, let me check this person out. It’s the same thing with your thought leadership. If you put this stuff out, they’re going to see something you did and say, this is so cool. Let me see what else they have. Yeah.

Christina interview (29:52)

Perfect, thank.

Christina links (29:53)

It was a pleasure exploring how strong ideas take shape with Mark Levy. Not by chasing perfection, but by writing often and without filter. From his early days as a writer in New York to advising brands and thought leaders from his home in Pennsylvania, Mark’s work shows the great ideas don’t shout, they stick. Along the way, he’s co-written How to Persuade People Who Don’t Want to be Persuaded, a book that hit number six on Barnes and Noble’s bestsellers list, and co-created Magic for Dummies, which has stayed in print for nearly 30 years. His own book, Accidental Genius, lays out the free-writing technique we discuss that has helped thousands unlock fresh thinking. And his TEDx talk, now with over a million views, explores how to create one idea that sets you apart.

I’m Christina Moore and you’ve been listening to A Mind For Marketing.