Hugh, of gapingvoid and Hughtrain Manifesto fame, brings up a valid point for companies, project teams, and individuals seeking to take on a “pirate”/challenger brand mentality.
The hard part is getting your clients on board. They spent the last 20 years in the Navy (status quo/same as it ever was), they'll be damned if they let you get away with all this pirate nonsense. Damn, it's hard enough getting colleagues on board, let alone clients.
To better address Hugh's point and to build upon my first Pirate Marketing Uprising post, here is another excerpt from Adam Morgan’s The Pirate Inside: Building a Challenger Brand Culture Within Yourself and Your Organization.
“… I should make it clear that I am not proposing to endlessly play out the pirate analogy throughout the book; although I am sure there is a book that could be written that draws entertaining parallels for marketing with every dimension of parrots and planks, it is not this one. Nor is the intention here to hopelessly romanticize organized crime, or to suggest in any way that Pirates were noble and honest and misunderstood.
On the whole, we are simply using Jobs’ notion of being a Pirate ('It's more fun to be a Pirate than to join the Navy.' - Steve Jobs) as a metaphor for being a certain sort of person who finds themselves wanting or needing to be a Challenger, working on a Challenger brand (and in this regard I will be using the terms ‘Pirate’ – or ‘Necessary Pirate’ – and ‘Challenger’ interchangeably in the book).
The move from being the Navy (i.e. behaving like everyone else in our company, or category) to being a ‘Pirate’ (i.e. doing what is imperative for the task we have set ourselves, regardless of the ‘wisdom’ we are offered from those around us) is frequently a matter of necessity, not fun or iconoclasm.
As such, the need to be a Pirate in this sense is not in itself an act of defiance, let alone aggression. It is about recognizing that things need to be done in a different way if the opportunity is to be grasped, and getting a team together to start setting that new way of doing things in motion. At the same time this new way may lie outside what your superiors apparently want you to do, and the historical best practices of the brand or company.
Success in being a Pirate (i.e. an individual or group who chooses to seek their fortune along a path other than that of the Navy) does not lie in having no rules. It is about moving from one set of rules, one model, to another. One that is more suited for the task in hand."
For those suffering from time fatigue and haven't read the full excerpt, I'll be posting Adam's six excuses for joining and remaining in the Navy this week.
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