25 Ways to Identify Your Unique Thought Leadership Perspective in a Crowded Market

Everyone in my category was writing the same few sentences about efficiency and going paperless, in the same vocabulary, and none of it sounded like the people I was selling to.

The way I found my own angle was unglamorous. I went back through 30 recorded sales calls and wrote down the exact words brokers used for the thing hurting them. Not one of them said “transaction management platform.” They said “chasing the addendum,” “the file is not complete,” “my coordinator is drowning,” and “the state audit is in March.” That list became the point of view, because it turned out I was the only person in the market willing to write about the boring middle of the job rather than the outcome at the end of it.

The differentiator was vocabulary before it was opinion. Write in the category’s language and you sound like the category. Write in the customer’s language and you sound like someone who has been in the room, and a reader can tell which one you are inside a paragraph.

The opinion followed from that on its own. Once I was describing the actual work, I could not honestly recommend piling more software onto it, which put me at odds with most of my industry and handed me something to say that a competitor could not copy without contradicting their own roadmap.

Find the sentences your buyers already say and publish those. A crowded market is usually crowded with people describing the same thing in the same borrowed words.

I didn’t start by trying to be a thought leader. I started by being curious about why people behave the way they do.

I noticed most leadership content treats symptoms rather than causes. I learned early in my career as a physiotherapist working with elite athletes that prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. You don’t hand someone a treatment plan until you know exactly what’s broken and why. Walk into most leadership development today and you’ll see the opposite: everyone’s prescribing resilience, agility, and growth mindset without diagnosing what’s actually failing in the leader in front of them.

That became my filter. Anywhere I saw an industry consensus, I asked what diagnosis it was skipping. That’s how my three-driver model came about (self-awareness, self-regulation, self-learning) and the Driver/Passenger distinction, which names something everyone half-recognizes but nobody had put a name to: the difference between people steering their own behavior and people being steered by habit, mood, or circumstance.

When my publisher, Wiley, asked what I was working on next, I knew self-leadership improves performance, but I was curious about the efficiency-versus-effectiveness paradox as AI enters our lives. The research became POTENTIAL-IZE: How Leaders Unlock Human Potential in the Age of AI, and it produced the IGNITE framework, a roadmap for humans to collaborate with AI rather than compete against it.

One concrete example: I’ve been working with an AI agent on my website, digging into which questions leaders actually ask AI search tools versus what the industry assumes they ask. “AI leadership speaker” turned up zero real demand. Nobody’s searching for that. What people actually ask about is the human side of AI, how to lead yourself when the machine can out-execute you. That gap between what the market performs and what it actually wants confirmed my angle: self-leadership as the prerequisite skill in an AI-saturated world was aimed at a real question, not a trending keyword.

So if I had to name one approach: stop asking what everyone else is saying, and start asking what diagnosis everyone else is skipping. The differentiation isn’t a better slogan. It’s a sharper root cause.

Mine came from a constraint rather than from a strategy.

Everything I publish carries my license. Anything I write could be read by a patient and by the board that regulates me at the same time, and I cannot write a different version for each. Most health content in my market is produced by people carrying no such consequence, so it claims more than it can defend. Once I accepted that I could only write what I would say in a room with a chart open, the voice sorted itself out.

The approach that made it sound different was publishing the limits. I keep a written list of 12 things we do not do, and where each of them goes instead, and it sits on the site rather than being hidden. Competitors were claiming breadth. I claimed a boundary, and said out loud where primary care stops and a specialist begins.

The reaction taught me something. People who read that page arrived better prepared and stayed longer, because they had chosen us on accurate information rather than on a promise.

If you are looking for a perspective in a crowded market, find the sentence your competitors are unwilling to write. It is usually the honest one, and it is the one nobody can copy without inheriting the risk that comes with it.

Mine came from picking the least fashionable available position and staying there.

The parking and mobility conversation is crowded with people talking about autonomous vehicles, smart city sensors and the future of the kerb. All interesting, all five to ten years out. I run Parksy, a peer-to-peer parking marketplace with about 140,000 listings, and the thing I actually know about is the boring present: that there is already an enormous amount of empty parking sitting behind people’s houses, and the problem is a coordination problem rather than a technology one.

That is a less exciting take, which is exactly why there was room in it. Thirteen years in the sector and no venture funding also means I can say things that people with a board cannot.

The approach I would recommend is to write down the sentence your competitors would never say because it is commercially inconvenient for them, and check whether you believe it. If you do, that is your position. For me it was that most parking technology is solving a problem that a spreadsheet and a neighbour could solve, and the industry keeps building sensors because sensors are easier to sell than behaviour change.

I didn’t start as a leadership development speaker and facilitator. I started as a camp counsellor, then a startup founder, then someone who kept getting asked to help other founders figure out why their teams were falling apart.

I backed into thought leadership because I kept seeing the same patterns and nobody else was naming them.

Here’s what I noticed. Every scaling company hits the same wall around 25 to 50 employees. The founder who got them there by doing everything themselves suddenly can’t anymore. They promote their best individual contributors into management roles. Those new managers have no idea how to lead. Communication breaks down. The culture that “just happened” when there were 12 people disappears. And everyone blames the new hires for not “getting it.”

I saw this pattern in dozens of companies. The same story, over and over. Accidental managers. Brilliant people failing not because they lacked talent but because nobody taught them how to actually lead a team.

That pattern became my perspective. Most leadership advice is written for executives at big companies. Nobody was speaking directly to the founder who just promoted their first manager and is watching everything fall apart. So I started.

One approach that differentiated my voice: I’m direct, but I also hold space for hard conversations. Most leadership content does one or the other. It’s either soft and supportive, or it’s blunt and challenges you. I do both. I’ll tell you that your feedback skills suck. And then I’ll sit with you while we figure out why that’s true and what to do about it.

That combination is rare. Directness without warmth is just aggression. Warmth without directness is just comfort. Leaders need someone who will name the uncomfortable thing and then stay in the room while they work through it. That’s what I try to be.

It comes from running actual workshops where people bring their real problems. You can’t just drop a hot take and walk away. You have to be there when someone realizes they’ve been the bottleneck on their own team for three years. That requires holding space, not just having opinions.

I don’t think having a thought leadership voice means trying to sound like you have an answer for everything. If anything, my own experience made me much more careful about that.

After cancer treatment, I remember how upsetting it was to watch my hair fall out and how difficult it was to find clear answers about what might actually help. Years later, even after becoming a trichologist and spending a lot of time studying hair loss, there are still areas, particularly around chemotherapy-related hair loss, where I find myself with more questions than answers.

That has probably shaped my voice more than anything else.

Hair loss is an emotional subject, so people are naturally drawn to confident promises and quick solutions. I try not to add to that noise. If the evidence for something is strong, I’m happy to talk about it. If it is still developing, I think we should say that too. And sometimes the most responsible answer is simply, “We don’t know enough yet.”

I still attend conferences, speak with other practitioners, and follow new research because my views should be allowed to change when better information comes along. To me, that is much more useful than trying to have the loudest voice in the market.

So if I had to name one thing that differentiates my perspective, it would be this: be knowledgeable, but stay curious. People can tell the difference between expertise and certainty for the sake of sounding authoritative.

Every crowded market is crowded with opinion, and almost nobody publishes the mechanics.

That was the gap I found. When I started writing about building a supplement brand, the category was full of people with a view on wellness and almost nobody explaining what it costs to make a bottle, how an ingredient earns its place, why a label reads the way it does, or what a brand is not permitted to claim. I could not out-opinion the loudest voices in that market and had no wish to try. What I could do was show the working.

So the approach was to write from the parts of the job that stay hidden, including the decisions that went badly: a supplier quote comparison, why we removed a product, what third-party testing costs and what it does not tell you. It is the least glamorous material available and the only material a competitor cannot copy, because it comes from having done the thing rather than having thought about it.

The test before publishing is whether somebody outside the business could have written it. If they could, it is opinion, and it will disappear into the feed with everything else.

The honest part nobody mentions is that it took about 8 months of writing that way before a single useful conversation came of it. Mechanics compound slowly and then all at once.

We looked at it from the point of view of what creative people should stop doing.

Our perspective on thought leadership comes from a very specific frustration we had when we arrived at Plainly Flows: surprisingly talented creative professionals spend an inordinate amount of time doing work that is not very creative.

Video versioning is a perfect example. Once a team has locked down the concept, design, messaging and structure, creating lots of variations can translate to hours of repetitive execution. That raised a larger question that separates how I talk about automation: What work should talented people never have to do again?

Instead of jumping into the fray about AI and automation taking over “creatives'” jobs, I like to break down creative processes into decisions and repetition. Humans should still be responsible for judgment, taste, strategy and original decisions. Technology should take on increasingly predictable production that follows those choices.

One of the ways I differentiate our voice is by showing the manual workflow first, and then talking about the technology. That keeps the conversation on a tangible problem, rather than abstract arguments about automation. This also lends credibility to our position because we’re not claiming everything should be automated.

My recommendation for founders is to create thought leadership about the tension your product makes you intimately familiar with. For us, that tension is efficiency vs. creative control. Having a definite boundary on each side is a far more distinctive perspective than simply being “pro-AI.”

I didn’t identify my unique perspective by looking for a gap in the market. I found it by trying to find language for something I had been noticing for years.

Even early in my career, I was trying to understand why things worked the way they did. Over time, I began to recognize how often the explanation led back to human decisions, including decisions made years earlier whose consequences had become embedded in systems, processes, and ways of working.

But recognizing that I saw organizations differently wasn’t the same as knowing how to talk about it. That part came through practice.

I started podcasting. I started writing. I started posting. I started networking and having conversations with people about what I was seeing. All along, I was working on the language and working through the ideas themselves.

The more I tried to explain what I was observing, the clearer my own perspective became. I started finding language for things I had experienced throughout my career but rarely heard discussed in larger forums or treated as topics worthy of attention in their own right.

So the approach that differentiated my voice wasn’t really differentiation at all. It was repetition. I kept putting my thinking into the world, paying attention to what I could explain clearly and where I was still struggling for the right words.

I didn’t develop a unique perspective and then start talking about it. Talking about it is how I discovered what was uniquely mine.

Wallpaper is marketed through imagery, giving designers limited terminology. Across all wallpapers, the terms beautiful, bold and statement-making, can be constantly found. I tried to distance myself from this terminology starting at an early stage, since these phrases do not provide the customer with any reference to visualize what the wallpaper looks like. I built up my point of view, which is focused on explaining how the wall changes the room since people don’t purchase wallpaper because of its design only but with the specific place in mind and with problems to solve. For me it is much better to speak about the proportions in a small corridor or tell how a busy pattern may look more balanced on the ceiling than on all four walls, since such things are the ones a potential buyer has to decide upon.

To tell you the truth, the real complexity starts after we define the idea. I have to make sure that this idea is implemented on the pages of the products, in email messages, in paid advertising and in content, and that I do not allow the text to sound mundane. If any page differs from others, the whole brand will be similar to other wallpaper brands. My work lies somewhere in between art and performance marketing, and I test the statements in the same way I test landing pages. I am interested in the conversion statistics and the time spent on the pages, as well as the engagement of people instead of likes, as likes show which information is interesting for customers, while the conversion helps to get to the conclusion. Because of this consistency, our search traffic increased by 34%, and we reduced the expenses connected with attracting customers by 18%, as the search traffic appeared to be a result of clarity used in the communication and the paid expenses were the result of people looking for answers to their inquiries.

I built my entire product line around one credential most competitors couldn’t claim. Every solution was designed by a practicing physician who treated the conditions these products address. In a market flooded with generic pain-relief gadgets and beauty tools, I anchored every piece of content, every package claim, and every customer conversation to that clinical origin.

My team talked about specific biomechanical problems and how each product was engineered to solve them. That physician-designed angle gave us a filter for everything. When we evaluated a new product idea, the first question was whether it traced back to a real clinical need I’d seen in practice.

If it didn’t, we passed. If it did, the marketing came easily because the story was already there in the patient experience.

The practical effect was that our voice carried a built-in trust signal competitors had to work much harder to manufacture. Customers reading our copy or watching a demo could feel the difference between someone selling a gadget and someone explaining why a particular arch support or compression sleeve works the way it does. Every new product adds another layer of clinical credibility to the catalog.

I think specificity will always win over being broad in any competitive market. Many people try to appeal to everybody since rejecting people is hard and because of that they become forgettable. I believe the opposite, the more narrow we can be, the more we will be remembered by the right people.

I demonstrated this belief in my own industry of insurance by changing my way of doing things from giving general advice about business protection to providing specific information about coverage gaps that contractors face. Saying that most people will not fit my model of service was scary at first but it in fact made those who fit trust me completely.

My application of this belief is very simple. Whenever someone asks me a broad question I will never provide a broad answer. I look for one specific and uncomfortable truth that lies beneath the question because this is the part that people will remember and share with others.

I tried to sound authoritative for years, taking inspiration from others in my niche. But despite posting frequently on LinkedIn, I wasn’t getting any real traction.

As someone who’s AuDHD, I realised that just as I’ve taught myself to mask in social situations, I was doing the same thing in my business.

One of the hardest things was stripping away what I thought I “should be” and focusing on who I am. I looked at the topics I wanted to focus on and wrote everything like an opinion.

It was scary, but for the first time, I didn’t sound like any other specialist, but like someone who has strong opinions and will always share them.

My approach is simple: I take a topic, break it down, and ask myself, “What do I feel about this?” Since I started thinking and writing like this, my LinkedIn posts in the past three months have got over 30,000 views and hundreds of comments.

My advice is simple: Don’t think about how you can stand out; keep it real and don’t be afraid to share your voice.

I pay attention to the questions that customers ask. It’s a competitive market, and there are lots of companies that sell similar products, which means that you have at least ten firms at any given point repeating the same thing as the other person.

Customers have heard it before, and it’s not really helping them. When they’re wondering which foam density or firmness to go with or which material works, they want to hear about those decisions and caution points so they can make better choices.

I also don’t shy away from telling customers if a product they’re looking at isn’t the right fit for them and something simpler or less expensive works better. Even though we’re a custom manufacturing firm, not every customer necessarily finds a solution with us.

Everything we sell isn’t right for every customer. Being open about this has actually helped our credibility more than trying to make our products seem like the best possible choice.

I don’t focus too much on setting myself apart from the competition. I know that I’m already doing that by talking about the things I learned from running the business instead of trying to pitch my products.

Our perspective came from focusing less on shelving as a commodity and more on what happens after it enters a store.

Retailers aren’t really buying pieces of steel. They’re trying to use limited floor space effectively, keep products visible, make restocking easier and avoid replacing fixtures prematurely. That gives us much more useful things to talk about than simply promoting another shelving product.

One approach we’ve used at Mills Shelving is to turn the questions customers repeatedly ask us into practical guidance around store layouts, shelving costs, durability and choosing the right configuration. First-hand customer questions are a strong filter for thought leadership: if people are already asking your team about something before buying, it’s probably worth explaining publicly.

I identified our unique thought leadership perspective by looking at where the market was becoming fragmented. Most agencies were still talking about SEO, paid ads, social media, and lead generation as separate services. I saw an opportunity to position them as parts of a complete client acquisition system.

With Attorney Visibility AI, our perspective became simple: visibility alone is not enough. A law firm can rank on Google, appear in ChatGPT, or generate hundreds of leads, but none of that matters if the firm cannot convert that attention into consultations and signed clients.

At Young & Hungry Digital Marketing, we apply the same philosophy to automotive dealerships. Instead of focusing only on generating traffic or leads, we build the entire acquisition journey—from Google and Meta ads, SEO, AI search visibility, and landing pages to CRM automation, lead nurturing, appointment setting, and sales conversion.

A major differentiator in the dealership space is our use of WhatsApp as part of the conversion and sales process. For many customers, especially in multicultural and Latino markets, WhatsApp can create a faster and more natural path from initial interest to an actual conversation with the dealership. We integrate that communication into the broader acquisition system rather than treating it as a separate channel.

One approach that has helped differentiate our voice across both brands is using real client data and actual acquisition scenarios instead of generic marketing advice. We focus on what happens from the first search, ad impression, or AI recommendation all the way through lead capture, CRM follow-up, WhatsApp conversations, appointment booking, and ultimately the sale or signed client.

That end-to-end perspective is what separates our thought leadership from agencies that focus only on individual tactics. We are not just talking about marketing visibility—we are talking about how to build a complete system that turns visibility into revenue.

A distinct voice emerged from treating the market less like a branding exercise and more like an evidence translation problem. Wellness categories often reward simplification, but oversimplifying technical subjects can damage trust later. I focused on the parts most people avoid because they are less glamorous, such as material tradeoffs, long-term reliability, compliance boundaries, and the difference between an intriguing study and a settled conclusion. That perspective resonated because it mirrored how thoughtful consumers actually make decisions when health and money are both involved.

One effective differentiator was operational honesty. Sharing how evidence standards, return behavior, customer questions, and acquisition economics shape communication created a more credible point of view. It showed that responsible messaging is not just philosophical; it is a practical business discipline.

In my field, SEO/PPC/Digital Marketing, the space is very crowded and noisy with generic advice and AI slop that most people rightfully ignore. I’ve tried to differentiate myself by focusing my energy on sharing how I answered real problems. For example, with SEO, it is easy to pump out an article like, “10 Tips for SEO Content Writing,” but if you write about how you connect your SEO work to actual business revenue through HubSpot attribution, that is something real and engaging that other marketers are likely struggling with and using the same tools. I’ve also tried to do more and more original research, proving out assumptions with real data instead of just leaning on the status quo.

In no way have I attempted to appear a specific way to build my personal brand or develop my thought leadership approach. In fact, I have gained over 20 years of experience in the field of search.

For many years, SEO discussions focused on rankings, keywords, links, and traffic. The change in my focus happened because I could see how people were modifying their perspective to discover new information. Instead of searching for links, they started asking for answers directly from Artificial Intelligence.

What I did to differentiate my voice was pretty straightforward – I paid attention to what I saw rather than following what was being said about the popular topic of the day in the SEO world. My customers’ questions, research and experiments, and even changes in search and AI behavior were the basis of my content.

If the observation goes against what SEOs say in their advice, I’ve got it covered. If I came across any new data that caused me to change my mind, I also did not hesitate to say so. I believe this to be honest as AEO and LLM visibility is still in development and trying to give all the answers is confusing.

The work I’ve done with companies in sectors like finance and healthcare has further reinforced my confidence. Visibility alone doesn’t cut it in these industries. Information should not only be visible but also reliable and meaningful.

What I’m trying to do is not to be the biggest voice, but to combine the knowledge of traditional research with my understanding of AI discovery and describe what I see. The most important thing I’ve realized is that efforts to be unique result in very generic thought leadership. One simply has to engage in the process, think, ask questions and share what the findings show.

When it comes to what I do, I do not claim to sound different from other PMP trainers out there. Competitors often become too involved with trying to search for a unique perspective instead of working with what they already know. My journey has been different from theirs. Between 2010 and 2012, I worked on the PMBOK® Guide, 5th Edition, as a Content Lead, before coming back in 2020 as an SME Reviewer for the 7th Edition. Since those experiences allowed me to help formulate the guide, I possess unique expertise in the field. That’s why, when it comes to writing or speaking, I do not simply repeat general knowledge because I use that acquired knowledge to train others, along with 20 years of experience in building PMTI in Dallas into a premier PMI Authorized Training Partner, with more than 80,000 professionals graduating through our course and having achieved a 99% pass rate.

I have changed the way I write because I do not write in general terms about project management anymore. The project management literature has a great deal of theoretical content which I find easy to create but sometimes difficult to retain in memory. For me, the focus is on the topics I know the most about, like the impact of certifications on the hiring process in companies like Amazon, General Dynamics, Booz Allen Hamilton, and the U.S. Air Force; the credentials that don’t guarantee getting a job; or the differences between project managers who achieve results and those who keep themselves busy without actual results. This is a narrow area, but this is the one I have gained experience in. The readers are able to tell when the author simply rewrites their sources or when the expert has long ago worked on the subject.

I developed that thought leadership voice by thinking about what questions I could answer based on my real experience instead of trying to sound like everyone else in the industry. The gardening space is very crowded. There is arguably an infinite amount of basic content about how to plant, prune, or water something. I had decades of seeing what became of plants after they left nurseries and came into real backyards, and I was privy to the problems homeowners were facing again and again. So I really got into practical ideas such as native plants, pollinator habitat, managing awkward growing conditions, climate change resilience, and why many potting instructions are misguided. One of the things that helped me to carve out my voice was being willing to argue with received wisdom when my experience contradicted it. Thought leadership is not about being the loudest. It does mean that your contribution to the discussion is sufficiently unique and fresh that it adds something to the input already given.

Everyone in my field publishes conclusions. Ten things to do, five mistakes to avoid, a confident opinion with nothing underneath it. It all sounds the same because it is the same, and a reader has no way to tell who is right.

What I settled on was publishing the working instead. Every claim comes with the thing it came from: which account, how big the sample was, over what period, what we changed and what we deliberately left alone. Where the evidence is thin, I say so in the piece. If a result came from one client over eight weeks, I write that, rather than dressing it up as a law of marketing.

The approach that made it sound different was including the numbers that go against me. When a test we expected to win came out flat, that went out too, with the figure attached. It is uncomfortable and that is precisely why nobody copies it. You cannot fake it without accounts to draw on, and you cannot publish it at all if your instinct is to look infallible.

The effect showed up in sales calls rather than in engagement metrics. People arrive already trusting the method, so the call is about scope instead of about whether I know what I am doing. Around 50% of our new business now comes from people who quote something I published back to me before price has been mentioned.

Show the evidence. A confident stranger cannot borrow it.

For us, it’s always been about seeing how we can be more approachable because the legal field is full of jargon, and this does not help during complex situations.

I understood what a stressful time each client is going through, so I decided to make our approach as practical and grounded as possible. Whenever we put out any content or speak to potential clients, we try to be grounded and simple in our approach. We don’t want to add even more stress by making things more complex.

I really wanted people to understand all of the issues at play and all aspects of the legal dispute before we could proceed. This is something that has naturally set us apart. It wasn’t a very calculated strategy because it came from a place of wanting to be useful and aligned with our clients, but it did work in our favor by setting us apart and making us a reliable entity in our field.