Essential reads for marketers: ‘The Pirate Inside’ by Adam Morgan
Following the huge success of the marketing and business bestsellers Eating the big fish, Adam Morgan has now brought us the next stage of his vision in The Pirate Inside – Building a Challenger Brand Culture Within You and Your Organization.
What Morgan sets in The pirate inside is a clear and highly readable guide to changing a traditional and unwieldy corporate model for a more elegant and successful Challenger culture. As such, The pirate inside it is a manual for anyone who has felt that they could build something else from their brand, were it not for the sometimes shortsighted demands of management or shareholders.
Although in recent times the Challenger business concept has become an established component of marketing jargon, it is worth reviewing Morgan’s own definition before delving into the subject. The pirate inside. According to Morgan, a Challenger is a brand or company that positions itself in such a way that it successfully competes against one or more clear market leaders, despite the inequity of its available resource. Additionally, the Challenger accomplishes this by refusing to obey some or all of the traditional ‘rules’ of its category or market.
Where Eating the big fish sought to detail the behavior and attitudes that belong to a successful Challenger, The pirate inside cares about the practicalities of transformation into a brand or business of this type. Morgan does not assume that his reader is intimately familiar with Eating the big fish, instead ensuring that a process and requirements analysis is combined with a wide range of case studies to provide a step-by-step path for the reader toward achieving the key aspects of a Challenger culture and attitude.
Having said this, The pirate inside assumes that the reader knows enough about the advantages and disadvantages of the Challenger business model to recognize its value to their business. As such, the book spends little time extolling the virtues of a Challenger approach per se, although exceptions do occur where Morgan seeks to help the reader implement a greater understanding of its benefits within his own organization.
The title of the book is taken from a comment made by Steve Jobs during an interview that: “It is more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.” Although Morgan could sometimes be accused of working the metaphor too hard, his ascription by The pirate inside it is generally a great success. He begins by asking what attracts many of us to the idea of piracy: freedom and the dangers of life outside of conventions, and he follows this by examining the factors that prevent us from embarking on that career. These factors are summed up in what Morgan calls: “The six excuses people made for staying in the Navy: doing the same thing everyone else has always done.”
At the same time, The pirate inside He sets out to take Jobs’ statement a step further, arguing that it is possible to combine the two pirate and naval cultures. Morgan accepts that while ‘pirates’ like Jobs or Branson will always be born, most of us are much less comfortable with the idea of trading security within an established company for the risks of corporate life as the captain of ours. Boat. It’s a key idea, and indeed a flaw of the book is perhaps that Morgan could allow himself to be more explicit in his refutation of this “this or that” mentality.
A primary concept within The pirate inside is that for a brand like Challenger to be successful it depends on its people adopting a new “personal and cultural model.” At this point, it is worth digressing to note that, throughout the book, Morgan insists that we view an action as: “the deliberate movement from a less suitable and successful model … to one that is more appropriate for the opportunity to brand. “Even pirates, it seems, have some rules.
Be that as it may, the inclusion of the “personal” is central to Morgan’s exposition: throughout the book, he makes clear that such change cannot take place without significant commitment from the potential catalyst; both to your brand and to a potentially high degree of personal exposure. This is not a book that the reader can come up with with a couple of concise sentences and an exercise or two, sure in his mind that he has done his business right. Instead of, The pirate inside aims to help those of us who have wistfully thought about shifting paradigms, breaking molds, and breaking parameters, but have little to no idea how to carry out such violent activities.
To answer that question, Morgan has included case studies from both the UK and the US, drawn from a diverse selection of industries. By doing so, you ensure that everyone except the most read of us gets something new. Interviews with the key personnel behind each example provide valuable information, not only about the brands and businesses in question, but also about the personalities who are drawn to offer that engagement.
At the very least, even the most nonchalant readers should enjoy the anecdotes and lessons provided by some of these industry leaders, proving that even the best business minds haven’t always had a straightforward path. For the rest of us The pirate inside is a book that offers marketers in any industry or experience a business vision to be proud of, and far fewer reasons than before to justify abandoning it.