The Pirate Inside: Building a Challenger Brand Culture Within Yourself and Your Organizations [Hardcover]

Although in recent times the concept of the Challenger business has become an established component in the marketing lingo, it is worth revisiting Morgan’s definition of it before going any further into The Pirate Inside. According to Morgan, a Challenger is a brand or company that positions itself in such a way as to compete successfully against one or more clear market leaders, despite the inequity of its available resource. Moreover, the Challenger achieves 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 behaviour and attitudes that belong to a successful Challenger, The Pirate Inside concerns itself with the practicalities of the transformation into such a brand or business. Morgan makes no assumption that his reader is intimately acquainted with Eating The Big Fish, instead ensuring that an analysis of processes and requirements is combined with a wide range of case studies to provide a step-by-step path for the reader towards achieving the key aspects of a Challenger culture and attitude.

Having said that, The Pirate Inside takes for granted that the reader knows enough of the advantages and disadvantages of the Challenger business model to recognise its value to his business. As such, the book spends little time extolling the virtues of a Challenger approach per se, although exceptions occur at those points where Morgan seeks to aid the reader in implementing a greater understanding of its benefits within his own organisation.

The book’s title is taken from a comment made by Steve Jobs during an interview that: “It’s more fun to be a Pirate than to join the Navy”. Although Morgan could be accused at times of working the metaphor a little too strenuously, his secondment of it for The Pirate Inside is in general very successful. He opens by asking what attracts so many of us to the idea of pirating – the freedom, and dangers, of life outside convention – and follows this by examining the factors that prevent us from striking out on such a career path. These factors are summarised in what Morgan calls: “The Six Excuses People Put Up For Staying In The Navy – doing the same as everyone else has always done”.

At the same time, The Pirate Inside sets out to take Jobs’ statement a step further, arguing that it is possible to combine the two cultures of pirate and navy. Morgan accepts that while there will always be born ‘pirates’ such as Jobs or Branson, the majority of us are far less comfortable with the idea of trading security within an established company for the risks of business life as the captain of our own ship. It is a key insight, and indeed one fault of the book is perhaps that Morgan could afford to be more explicit in his rebuttal of this ‘either/or’ mindset.

A primary concept within The Pirate Inside is that for a brand to succeed as Challenger depends upon 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 such an action as: ”the deliberate move from one less suitable and successful…model to another that is more appropriate to the opportunity for the brand”. Even pirates, it seems, have some rules.

Be this as it may, the inclusion of the ‘personal’ is central to Morgan’s exposition – throughout the book he makes it clear that such a change cannot take place without a significant commitment from the potential catalyst; both to his brand and to a potentially high degree of personal exposure. This is not a book from which the reader can come away with a couple of pithy phrases and an exercise or two, secure in his mind that he has thereby done right by his business. Instead, The Pirate Inside aims to help those of us who have thought longingly of shifting paradigms, breaking moulds and smashing parameters, but have little or no idea of how to go about such violent pursuits.

To answer that question, Morgan has included case studies from both the UK and the US, drawn from a diverse selection of industries. In doing so, he ensures that all but the most widely read of us will take something new away. Interviews with the key personnel behind each example provide valuable insight, not only into the brands and businesses concerned, but also into the personalities that are drawn to offer such commitment to them.

If nothing else, even the most blasé of readers should enjoy the anecdotes and lessons supplied by some of these industry leaders, demonstrating that even the best business minds haven’t always had plain sailing. For the rest of us, The Pirate Inside is a book that offers marketers from any industry or background a business vision to be proud of – and far fewer grounds than before to justify abandoning it.