You used to see it everywhere: whitepapers, research reports, industry experts building thought leadership empires. CMOs invested heavily in positioning themselves and their brands as category authorities.
Now? It's mostly gone.
We don't see it anymore. And that's not because companies stopped caring about leadership. It's because the world changed, but marketing didn't adapt.
The disconnect starts with a simple truth: Most CMOs are so buried in the thousand-and-one things required just to execute basic marketing that thought leadership becomes an afterthought. "We'll get to that eventually." Except they never do.
But there's a bigger reason: When they do attempt thought leadership, they're still doing it the old way.
You're still publishing 20-page reports. You're still creating long videos. You're still gating content behind forms nobody wants to fill out. And you're still distributing it on your website, expecting buyers to come find it.
But buyers aren't on your website anymore.
Here's what nobody talks about: Even great thought leadership dies if it's not distributed in channels where people actually consume content.
Your brilliantly researched report sitting on your website? It might as well not exist. A 15-minute video about industry trends? Nobody's watching that on mobile.
The companies innovating in thought leadership understand distribution. They're taking complex ideas and breaking them into:
What changed isn't the need for thought leadership. It's how people want to consume it.
There's a difference between thought leadership and regular content. Most companies confuse the two.
Regular content addresses your product or your features. It's tactical. It fits someone's buyer journey. That's good, but it's not thought leadership.
Real thought leadership challenges the reader. It makes them stop and think. It changes how they view the world. Done right, great thought leadership is powerful enough to change someone's behavior all by itself.
Think about revenue marketing. Before that term existed, there was just "demand generation" or "lead gen marketing." We saw the world differently—we saw that marketers could sit at the revenue table. By introducing that framework, we changed how marketing leaders think about their role.
That's thought leadership.
Here's another thing missing: Courage.
Good thought leadership requires being brave enough to look at your market and say something uncomfortable. It requires opinions. It requires taking stands. Most companies are afraid to do that.
Instead, they create bland, safe content that offends nobody and convinces nobody.
Real thought leadership has personality. It makes people feel something. Whether that's excitement, motivation, or even frustration—it galvanizes people into action. It's not about building a new model or creating a clever acronym. It's about making people care enough to change their behavior.
Here's what we're seeing: The best CMOs know that positioning and messaging is becoming a competitive advantage. They're finally realizing volume and demand gen isn't working like it used to.
But most are still not leading the thought leadership effort.
Marketing is dragging behind, executing someone else's vision instead of leading the market. The C-suite is pushing the narrative, and marketing is just trying to keep up.
That's backwards.
Marketing should be looking at the market and saying: "We can change this. We can have an impact. Here's the thought leadership we need to build to get there."
If you want to be a change agent—and the best CMOs are—you need to do more than execute thought leadership. You need to lead it. You need to position yourself as someone with a point of view. Not just about your products, but about how your industry should evolve.
Thought leadership isn't dead. It's just misunderstood.
The brands winning in 2026 will be the ones who understand that thought leadership can be powerful in 45 seconds. They'll distribute in the channels where buyers actually are. They'll be brave enough to challenge conventional thinking.
And they'll recognize that the best thought leadership doesn't come from the C-suite alone—it comes from marketing leaders who are willing to see the market differently and change how others see it too.
That's where real revenue impact begins.
See the episode live: www.pedowitzgroup.com/revenue-marketing-raw