Which Companies Need Pirates

Adam Morgan is one of the world’s leading brand experts. His new book ‘The Pirate Inside’ draws attention to a very interesting issue. It explains the ‘pirates’ inside companies. He says that companies which want to create strong brands and get ahead of the competition on a global scale need to have pirates in their organizations with conflicting ideas, creativity and behavior.

“The Pirate Inside” the new book by world famous marketing guru Adam Morgan explains to a significant degree the discourses of well-known brands. It says that most of the time the creators of strong brands are executives who do not attract attention because they are perceived as eccentric or perhaps a little insane. Morgan describes these people, who are usually middle management rather than high level CEOs or general mangers, as ‘the pirates inside’.

Adam Morgan stresses that not every company needs to have a pirate inside it, but he particularly recommends this approach to companies which are competing with major players on major markets. Adam Morgan explained to us how he had discovered the ‘pirates inside’. The responses he gave to our questions were as follows:

In this book you talk about a new manifesto. What are the rules and main ideas of this new manifesto?

Today, if you conduct a survey, you can find microcultures functioning very successfully in a large number of companies. If you look at the people who created these cultures, you can see that they are the pioneers in creating a strong strategy to make a brand successful. The real struggle is to be able to propagate this strategy within the company. I draw attention to the attitudes and qualities that are required for the process of developing these strategies and ideas.

What are these attitudes and qualities?

For example, in order to find the pirate inside, that is the person who has the vision and method to make the company successful, you have to carry out something like market research. In the same way that you try to learn the behavior and attitudes of the customers, if you are conducting this kind of research then you have to carry out a similar survey to determine the employees’ behavior and attitudes. One of these attitudes is looking inside. The second is creativity. If you think that you have sorted out these two conditions then go on to the third. This is the way the answer ‘no’ is perceived.

THE SIX SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF COMPANY PIRATES

DIFFERENT VIEWPOINT I can say that they definitely have a different way of looking at things. For example, during the process of handling a product category, they can interrupt it and, instead of the existing process, introduce a brand new process which defines a completely different category.

THEY PRODUCE IDEAS QUICKLY They give you an idea and then immediately come up with another brand-new idea. When they are defending an idea these people can demonstrate all their creativity until it is accepted.

VERY GOOD ADVERTISERS Another special characteristics is that they take every opportunity to advertise the idea they are defending.

EXPERIMENTAL MARKETING We know how much importance successful modern brands attach to experimental marketing.

BRAND IDENTITY It is very important to produce a brand identity. Just as they implement a brand identity that reflects all of that brand’s values, so they have an identity which explains their own ideas.

STRONG RELATIONS WITH EMPLOYEES Those who work with strong brands should establish strong communication. For this reason, continuous motivation is very important for those who are managing a brand. The pirates inside are those who ensure this motivation within their own teams.

HANDE D. SUZER
hdemirel@capital.com.tr