Thought Leadership Research: What and Why

Why is Thought Leadership Research Important?

Part of reaching the right target audiences is demonstrating brand authority in a crowded space—using key data points and insights to support press coverage and demonstrate deep knowledge. This type of proprietary custom research that supports your brand and marketing content is important in many vertical markets. Logica Research has deep experience in supporting financial brands, technology companies and growing organizations with thought leadership research—a key component of the marketing strategy mix.


What is Thought Leadership Research?

Marketing expert Michael Brenner defines thought leadership as a “type of content marketing where you… consistently answer the biggest questions on the minds of your target audience on a particular topic.” When you use research to support your answers to these big questions, you gain validity with your audience. Gathering data to support your company’s thought leadership is key—it not only can support your opinions, but it might also shed light on areas for which you had limited information, areas that can help bolster your viewpoints or widen your applicability. 


How Do Financial Brands Use Thought Leadership Research?
Backing your marketing content of all kinds with consumer and B2B research is important, and working with a partner who deeply understands the financial world landscape is key. Insights from thought leadership marketing research can be applied in many different areas of the marketing mix.

  • Public Relations – when news released by your company is supported with key data and insights, it gets more coverage and is viewed with more confidence in the marketplace.
  • Thought Leadership Pieces – insights and data collected can bolster company content no matter how it is presented, whether as a white paper, on your website, through speaking engagements and industry events, or in social content. 
  • Marketing Content – your own custom marketing research study can be used to support your marketing content in articles, blog posts, white papers, and social posts. 
  • Sales Enablement – research results can be used in sales materials used by sales teams to support claims.

Tips for Developing Great Thought Leadership Research

Logica® has been conducting thought leadership for more than 15 years for major brands like Bloomberg, Charles Schwab, PayPal and Visa. Generally, thought leadership research for financial brands and fintech is conducted with online surveys.  Here are a few key tips to help make your thought leadership be successful.

  • FOCUS on the key insights you want to communicate to your audience
    Although this may seem obvious, it’s critical to keep your focus on the insights you want to be able to communicate with the results of the study. Logica Research has developed and honed a brainstorming process that keeps our clients focused on the outcome they want to achieve–whether it’s ideal headlines, talking points or discovering new insights.  Our process leads to results that garner mass media attention, drive leads and help with conversion.
  • ASK great questions – Great questions lead to great answers…and great content.  Make sure you work with a team that can bring expertise to the question development to ensure you are getting new and interesting insights. 
  • GATHER an interesting or unique sample – Sometimes it’s great to have really large samples for thought leadership studies but often it’s more about having unique and interesting samples–like women-owned small businesses, a Gen Z focus, or those who own or use a specific kind of product like cryptocurrency.  Make sure you work with a team who can design the best sample for your objectives and who can get high quality results.

We believe in the importance of thought leadership data so much that we have our own ongoing Logica® Future of Money Study, where we track the consumer money mindset. Not only does this deep study provide data to support our company’s thought leadership efforts, the insights we collect are used by our clients to support content as well. To learn more about accessing the full data from our ongoing study, reach out to us


Thought Leadership Research Case Study
To understand how this works, you can take a look at one of our thought leadership research case studies. In the example shown here, our ongoing Logica® Future of Money Study sparked the interest of PayPal, and they approached us to explore the future of work—including how people around the globe are being paid and how they manage their cash flow. Because of Logica’s deep expertise in this arena, our experienced financial services marketing research team was able to quickly design and field this study conducting research in eight countries and multiple languages. The resulting insights were used by PayPal to create content that urged world leaders to rethink the design of retail financial services within the context of the future of work. The study continues to generate press, reinforcing PayPal’s thought leadership position around the evolving world of the future of work.


Getting Thought Leadership Research Right
Look for a research company that can ask the right questions to get headlines, garner media attention, highlight your leaders and support your brand. When you need the media spotlight or need to establish your company’s expertise, Logica® has the research approaches to gather the insights that support your content and make it stand out.


Financial brands work with us to uncover the thought leadership data needed to support all types of content on topics ranging from generational research, to retirement, to consumer investment strategies and more. Let’s get started!®

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