You're Not a Thought Leader, You're a Thought Borrower

Open LinkedIn on any given Tuesday and you will find roughly four thousand people in the ecommerce space sharing the same insight.

The wording will be different. The formatting will vary. Some will use carousels, some will write threads, some will post a selfie at a conference with a caption that begins "Last week I had a realisation." But the underlying idea will be identical, because it was never their idea in the first place.

Someone published a study. Someone else summarised it. A third person turned it into a hot take. A fourth person screenshot the hot take and added their own commentary.

By the time it reaches you, the original insight has been photocopied so many times it is barely legible, like a fax of a fax of a fax. But everyone in the chain is positioning themselves as a thought leader.

They are not thought leaders. They are thought borrowers. And the ecommerce industry has an epidemic of them.

Let me be specific, because I am not talking about sharing other people's work and giving credit. That is fine. That is how ideas are supposed to travel.

I am talking about the practice of taking someone else's thinking, removing the attribution, wrapping it in your own anecdote or analogy, and presenting it as though you arrived at this conclusion through your own hard-won experience. We all know what this looks like. We have all seen it. Some of us have probably done it.

The Baymard Institute publishes research about checkout usability. Within 48 hours, twenty agencies have written blog posts that are essentially "hey, did you know checkout abandonment is a problem?" with the same statistics reworded just enough to avoid plagiarism. Nobody is adding new thinking. Nobody is challenging the findings. Nobody is running their own research to see whether the data holds for their specific clients. They are just repackaging existing knowledge and calling it content marketing.

Shopify announces a new feature. Twenty SaaS companies immediately publish articles explaining what it means for merchants, all of which say the same thing, because there is only one thing to say about a feature that was announced six hours ago and that nobody has actually used yet. But the content calendar demands a post, so a post gets written. The SEO team is happy. The audience is indifferent.

You wouldn’t talk like this in a pub…

This is the content equivalent of a pub where everyone is repeating the same joke they heard on the same podcast. For a while it feels like conversation. Then you realise nobody in the room has an original thought and you start wondering why you came out.

Volume does not beat insight

The problem is structural. Most agencies and SaaS companies have set up their content operations to produce volume, not insight. There is a publishing schedule. There are topic clusters. There are keyword targets. The entire system is designed to output a certain number of posts per month, and the easiest way to hit that number is to react to what already exists rather than create something new.

Original thinking takes time. It requires going down paths that might not lead anywhere. It means having conversations with clients and analysing your own data and sitting with an idea long enough to develop a genuine perspective. That is slow. Rewriting someone else's blog post takes an afternoon.

And here is the uncomfortable bit: the audience can tell. Not always consciously, but they can feel it. There is a difference between reading something that makes you think "I have never considered that" and reading something that makes you think "yeah, I have seen this take seventeen times already." The first creates trust and attention. The second creates the mild, ambient boredom that characterises most B2B content consumption. You read it, you sort of nod, and then you immediately forget it. Which is not, generally speaking, the outcome anyone is aiming for.

How do you do genuine thought-leadership?

So what does actual thought leadership look like, and why is almost nobody doing it?

Genuine thought leadership comes from doing things that create knowledge. Running experiments. Analysing your own client data. Conducting original research. Having a contrarian position that you can back up with evidence, not just vibes. It means being willing to say "everyone thinks X, but our experience suggests Y" and then showing your working.

It also means being willing to be wrong. Thought borrowing is safe because you are never really staking out a position. If the original source turns out to be flawed, you were just sharing, not endorsing. But genuine thought leadership means putting your reputation behind an idea. That is frightening, which is exactly why so few people do it, and exactly why the people who do it command attention.

The companies that are actually building authority in this space are the ones that have figured out that frequency matters less than originality. One piece of genuinely new thinking, published once a month, will do more for your reputation than four recycled hot takes per week.

But that requires a different kind of content operation. One that prioritises depth over volume. One that gives people time to think instead of time to type.

If you want to know whether your content is thought leadership or thought borrowing, here is a simple test: could a competitor publish the same article with only their logo swapped in?

If yes, it is not thought leadership. It is wallpaper. And in an industry that is absolutely papered with the stuff, the companies that start producing something original will look like a window in a wall of beige.