of B2B decision-makers and C-suite executives say quality thought leadership makes them willing to pay a premium to work with the company that produced it
Edelman–LinkedIn 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report — 3,484 executives, 7 countries, fielded Nov 30–Dec 14, 2023
Expert content moves price, not just perception: 60% of B2B decision-makers and C-suite executives say strong thought leadership makes them willing to pay a premium to work with the organization behind it, and 73% of decision-makers call it a more trustworthy basis for judging a vendor’s competence than the vendor’s own marketing materials. Those numbers come from the Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact study, the closest thing the category has to a standing benchmark on whether expert content changes buying behavior. The series is now seven years old. The two most recent installments — a 3,484-executive, seven-country wave fielded in December 2023, and a 1,934-executive, US-only wave fielded in March–April 2025 — are the most current public data, and they were built to different scopes, which matters for how far the numbers can be stretched.
How many are actually reading it
In the 2024 wave, 52% of decision-makers and 54% of C-suite executives said they spend an hour or more a week reading thought leadership. The 2025 wave, narrowed to US respondents only, recorded higher figures for both groups it tracked: 64% of “target” decision-makers — the functional buyers — and 63% of what the report calls “hidden” decision-makers, meaning finance, legal, procurement and compliance staff who shape a purchase without being its public face, cleared the same one-hour bar. The jump looks like a trend. It is not a clean one: one sample averages seven markets, the other is US-only, and the 2025 report’s own description of its subjects as “global business executives” sits oddly next to a methodology page that lists the single market surveyed as the United States.
What extra trust is worth
Where the two waves ask an identical question, the answers move within a few points of each other rather than diverging. Both years asked whether an organization’s thought leadership is “a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities and competencies than its marketing materials and product sheets.”
| Metric | 2024, 7-country average | 2025, US hidden buyers | 2025, US target buyers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Read 1+ hour of thought leadership a week | 52% | 63% | 64% |
| Trust it over marketing materials to judge capability | 73% | 64% | 65% |
| Say it beats traditional marketing at proving a vendor’s value | not asked | 71% | 73% |
The trust shows up further down the pipeline. Seventy percent of C-suite leaders in the 2024 wave said a piece of thought leadership had at least occasionally led them to question whether to keep an existing supplier; among decision-makers who reached that point, 25% went on to end or significantly cut the relationship. In the 2025 wave, 79% of hidden decision-makers — the buying-group members sales reps rarely get in a room — said they are more likely to advocate for a vendor’s proposal during an RFP process if that vendor consistently produces high-quality content. The same report, citing earlier research, notes that more than 40% of B2B deals stall on internal misalignment inside the buying group: precisely the population thought leadership appears best positioned to reach.
The gap between influence and measurement
The counterweight sits on the production side. In the 2024 survey, 19% of thought-leadership producers said their organization has no process at all for measuring the content’s effectiveness, and 42% still gauge it mainly by website and social traffic — a proxy that says nothing about the premium pricing or RFP advocacy buyers report experiencing. The buyer-side numbers describe an asset with a measurable effect on price and trust. The producer-side numbers describe an asset most companies are still tracking by pageview.
Methodology
- Sources
- Edelman and LinkedIn, “2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report” (“Reaching Beyond the Ready”), online survey of 3,484 business executives (managers and above) across the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Singapore, Australia and India, fielded November 30–December 14, 2023, margin of error ±2.8% (edelman.com). Edelman and LinkedIn, “2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report” (“Invisible Influence: Unlocking the Power of Hidden Buyers”), online survey of 1,934 business executives in the United States, fielded March 17–April 3, 2025, margin of error ±2.0% (edelman.com). The deal-stall figure cited in the 2025 report is itself sourced by Edelman to Matt Dixon, “The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision,” 2022.
- Scope limits
- The two waves are not a clean year-over-year trend line: the 2024 sample spans seven countries and 3,484 respondents, while the 2025 sample is US-only and roughly half the size, so any apparent increase between them reflects who was asked, not necessarily a change in behavior. Both studies are commissioned by LinkedIn, the platform on which most of this “thought leadership” content circulates, and both rely on self-reported attitudes and stated intentions — willingness to pay, likelihood to advocate — rather than observed purchase or pricing data. Figures describe management-level respondents recruited on LinkedIn, not the general business population.
- Updates
- This brief will be revised as new data is published. Corrections are handled under our corrections policy.