A Thought Leader is an individual or firm ascribed the quality of ‘Thought leadership’. Thought leadership is influencing a narrative by understanding what needs to be done. A Thought Leader can be recognized as an authority in a specific field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded, that can be an expert, a historical figure, or a 'wise person' with worldly impact.
From the perspective of a Thought Leader as the ‘Go-To-expert’ being a thought leader means to consistently answer the biggest questions on the minds of the target audience on a particular topic. Thought leaders are commonly asked to speak at public events, conferences, or webinars to share their insight with a relevant audience. In a 1990 article in the Wall Street Journal Marketing section, Patrick Reilly used the term "thought leader publications" to refer to such magazines as Harper's.
The Go-To-expert perspective on thought leadership is expressed by Joel Kurtzman (1994), editor-in-chief of the magazine Strategy & Business, who said that “A thought leader is recognized by peers, customers and industry experts as someone who deeply understands the business they are in, the needs of their customers and the broader marketplace in which they operate. They have distinctively original ideas, unique points of view and new insights.” In the previous decade, the term was revived and re-engineered by marketers.
Thought leadership is important for both Consumer and B2B companies. Thought leaders need to inspire consumers to act and to take the next step in their journey. Influencing a narrative by understanding what needs to be done – thought leadership – refers in business and marketing to a potentially winning strategy. It is seen as a way of increasing or creating demand for a product or service. High tech firms often publish white papers with analyses of the economic benefits of their products as a form of marketing. These are distinct from technical white papers. Consulting firms frequently publish house reports, e.g. The McKinsey Quarterly,A.T. Kearney Executive Agenda, Strategy's Strategy and Business,or Deloitte Reviewwhere they publish the results of research, new management models, and examples of the use of consulting methodologies.
The phrase "thought leader" is identified by some writers as an annoying example of business jargon, and appeared in Forbes magazine's 2013 annual "tournament" of "corporate America’s most insufferable" business buzzwords and clichés. Kevin Money and Nuno Da Camara of the John Madejski Centre for Reputation at the University of Reading's Henley Management College write that the nebulous nature of the phrase (the unclear nature of "what is and what is not thought leadership") contributes to its reputation among cynics as "meaningless management speak."Some writers, such as Harvard Business Review contributor Dorie Clark, have defended the phrase while agreeing "that it is very icky when people call themselves thought leaders because that sounds a little bit egomaniacal." New York Times columnist David Brooks mocked the lifecycle of the role in a satirical column entitled "The Thought Leader," published in December 2013.
A parody on the term was published in 2016 by Chris Kelly on Canadian television's This is That program. In the process of the discussion, imitating TED talks, Kelly elicits responses from the audience that exemplify the effect he describes as the result of applying well-known marketing techniques to achieve the impression of being an erudite speaker.
Opinion leadership is leadership by an active media user who interprets the meaning of media messages or content for lower-end media users. Typically the opinion leader is held in high esteem by those who accept their opinions. Opinion leadership comes from the theory of two-step flow of communication propounded by Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz. Significant developers of the theory have been Robert K. Merton, C. Wright Mills and Bernard Berelson.This theory is one of several models that try to explain the diffusion of innovations, ideas, or commercial products
In order for someone to be an opinion leader there must be a set of supporters or lower-end media users who follow their lead. According to Yufu Kuwashima, an opinion leader’s power and influence comes from the network created by their followers. Dedicated supporters reinforce the leader’s messaging to other media consumers, strengthening their influence. If one were to remove the opinion leader there would still be a network of connected users that could share ideas with one another. An opinion leader has constructed this network, but the ability to influence others lies in the network itself. In order to effectively influence the opinion of followers, they must find the leader to be above them.
Emotions are biologically-based psychological states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioural responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, creativity, and motivation.
Research on emotion has increased over the past two decades with many fields contributing including psychology, medicine, history, sociology of emotions, and computer science. The numerous theories that attempt to explain the origin, function and other aspects of emotions have fostered more intense research on this topic. Current areas of research in the concept of emotion include the development of materials that stimulate and elicit emotion. In addition, PET scans and fMRI scans help study the affective picture processes in the brain.
From a mechanistic perspective, emotions can be defined as "a positive or negative experience that is associated with a particular pattern of physiological activity." Emotions produce different physiological, behavioral and cognitive changes. The original role of emotions was to motivate adaptive behaviors that in the past would have contributed to the passing on of genes through survival, reproduction, and kin selection.
In some theories, cognition is an important aspect of emotion. Other theories, however, claim that emotion is separate from and can precede cognition. Consciously experiencing an emotion is exhibiting a mental representation of that emotion from a past or hypothetical experience, which is linked back to a content state of pleasure or displeasure. The content states are established by verbal explanations of experiences, describing an internal state.
Emotions are complex. There are various theories on the question of whether or not emotions cause changes in our behaviour. On the one hand, the physiology of emotion is closely linked to arousal of the nervous system. Emotion is also linked to behavioral tendency. Extroverted people are more likely to be social and express their emotions, while introverted people are more likely to be more socially withdrawn and conceal their emotions. Emotion is often the driving force behind motivation.On the other hand, emotions are not causal forces but simply syndromes of components, which might include motivation, feeling, behaviour, and physiological changes, but none of these components is the emotion. Nor is the emotion an entity that causes these components.
Emotions involve different components, such as subjective experience, cognitive processes, expressive behavior, psychophysiological changes, and instrumental behavior. At one time, academics attempted to identify the emotion with one of the components: William James with a subjective experience, behaviorists with instrumental behavior, psychophysiologists with physiological changes, and so on. More recently, emotion is said to consist of all the components. The different components of emotion are categorized somewhat differently depending on the academic discipline. In psychology and philosophy, emotion typically includes a subjective, conscious experience characterized primarily by psychophysiological expressions, biological reactions, and mental states. A similar multi-componential description of emotion is found in sociology. For example, Peggy Thoitsdescribed emotions as involving physiological components, cultural or emotional labels (anger, surprise, etc.), expressive body actions, and the appraisal of situations and contexts.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_leadership, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_leader