Influx

Adam Morgan’s “Eating The Big Fish-How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders” is one book that every planner has in their library, a truly classic brand manual that’s full of real life examples based on exhaustive research, in addition to great models and frameworks.

The book is now 10 years old, thankfully there’s an updated second edition that comes out tomorrow.

Adam was kind enough to answer a few of my questions in a great amount of detail that reveal some interesting insights into his background and the genesis of the book.

Here’s Part One of a two part interview.

1. Can you tell us a little about your background?
 
In my last year at University I did a summer job in the men’s underwear department at Harrods. It was interesting for two reasons. One was I managed to sell 1,200 pairs of Zegna men’s silk boxers, mostly to women who appeared to have no idea what their husband’s girth was. And the second was I started going out with a woman in the tartan department whose dad, it turned out, was in advertising. He was frighteningly impressive, particularly over a breakfast table, and I’d always hankered to be casually intimidating, so applied for a few agencies.

I was part of the graduate trainee intake at BMP in London (now part of DDB) in 1982. I started out in fact as the worst account handler in the history of advertising. I switched to planning after 18 months, and loved it. in those days planning at BMP was heavily involved in strategy and advertising development research, so you were very, very close to your consumer – I did 105 groups with beer and spirits drinkers in my first year alone, mostly (as I selectively remember it) in skittle alleys in the windowless basements of Welsh working men’s clubs. It was a great experience. Perhaps more to the point I got to work at a very early stage with John Webster, one of the four or five greatest creative talents in the history of British advertising. Very challenging, hugely rewarding.

After four years I left to join a small, punchy agency called Still Price Court Twivy S’Souza, because I loved the energy and small size of the place.  I was the 33rd person to join. They had a great run for a few years, and were then acquired by IPG and merged with Lintas. We were the first ‘log on the Lintas fire’ as Frank Lowe went on to describe it later. We were very naive, in retrospect. We thought we could go in to a large company like Lintas with long-established client relationships and just turn the quality of thinking and work around in about six months, and in reality of course many of the clients didn’t want that at all. We had some great talent – the planners I worked with then were for the most part astonishingly good – but never quite managed to produce the creative work to turn it around.

I became very disillusioned with advertising, and rather fell out with the CEO, and by chance was rung up about a job at Planning Director at Chiat Day in LA, and flew out for an interview. I fell in love with it almost immediately – with its mythology, with the Gehry building (how can you say no to a three storey pair of binoculars?), with the charisma and ideas of Lee Clow, Bob Kuperman, Jane, Newman and Jay Chiat, and frankly with the idea of having part of Jay’s art collection – a Stella or a Rauschenberg – right in the middle of one’s working environment. But I wasn’t sure the creative department really wanted planning, so hesitated for about five months before making the jump.

When I arrived in August, the brief there was to rebuild planning, take one’s time do it properly. And then about two weeks later we lost Reebok in NY, and the brief changed to something rather pithier and immediate: ‘Pitch’. I imagine there will be a lot of planning directors who will be familiar with that situation. So we pitched, and lost the first two, and then we just started winning. We had Lee and Kupe in the room on most pitches, and they had the ability to turn a room on the day. Every agency needs one of those people, and we had two. For the next couple of years we were more or less unstoppable – I think we only lost one pitch in LA over that time, and in fact twice had to stop pitching for several months to bed down the business we had won. And the planners I was working with unearthed some great new talent they brought into the agency – Rob Klingensmith, Bonnie Wan, Mia von Sadowsky. A really exciting new generation of thinkers underneath us all.
 
It was a very inspiring environment. Jay and Lee created a sense of possibility around thinking and ideas that has stayed with me every since.
 

2. What was the original inspiration behind Eating The Big Fish?

After a few years there, Omnicom bought us and we were internationally merged with TBWA. The inspiration for writing the book came from a new business credentials deck that the European New Business Director of TBWA , a very smart woman called Kate Marber, shared with me while I was still in LA. On page three of the deck was the statement ‘We specialize in challenger brands’.  It was the first fresh thing I had seen in a creds deck for years. I leant forward- couldn’t wait to see what was coming next. But as it turned out there wasn’t another reference to challengers again.
 
I said at the end to Kate that I had been very struck by that idea,  which was true for both TBWA and Chiat/ Day, and we talked about it. I said I thought there was a much bigger idea in there to be played out in more detail and substance; she agreed. And we went away to think about it.
 
Developing the thinking took a while. I presented a prototype of the principles outlined in the book, in the form of five credos (rather than the eventual eight) as part of a pitch to Montgomery Ward, which we lost. I had been working with some of the LA planners on a presentation called ‘Creativity as a Business Tool’ and a lot of the upfront analysis was great for the front end of the book. Kate did some work on it in Europe with David Wright. And we had a very good two day session with a lot of the TBWA planners talking about challengers. Yet the real imperative was for two things: first, some primary research with important and influential challengers, and second to move more deliberately beyond advertising as the ‘solution’. Of course a strong idea and creative breakthrough would be an important element of it, but it was clear that the way challengers broke through was in considerable part about what they did before they even thought about communications, and we didn’t really know enough about that.
 
As it happened, I was going through a phase of taking a sabbatical every five years to try to write novels, and had a six month sabbatical coming up, so I decided to use it to research and write a business book instead, about challenger brands.  I reckoned (wrongly, as it turned out) that if I was published in business it would be easier to get published in fiction. And the agency management said they would support the challenger idea being the broader agency positioning when I returned there after my sabbatical. And so off I went: I identified 50 challengers I wanted to talk to, from Cirque du Soleil to Fox to Goldfish, a group of whom the agency had worked with or still did, and started the research and writing.
 
In fact, while I had a great sabbatical, it didn’t go well after that for a long time. By the time I came back to work six months later, I had only half finished the book. My wife and I had bought a large house in London, which needed gutting and completely redoing and so I was writing in brick dust in the evenings and weekends, spending too little time with my young family and a lot of time – three days a week – in Amsterdam on Nissan and Apple. It was a very, very painful process; took me about a year more to actually finish it. As it happened, when I finally finished the book, the Global Agency Management didn’t want the positioning anymore – they felt it was restrictive, and would limit them from pitching for market leaders. And to make matters more interesting they asked me to lead to a team to come up with a different positioning altogether.
 
I am an easy going bloke, but for a long time I was very angry about this. To put eighteen months of your life into making something, and then to have it very casually ignored was something I found very hard to take. Even by the time Ieft, only three of the six key players had had the courtesy (I can’t think of a better word) to sit through the presentation about challengers that came out of the book.  Only Alasdair, my European boss, was really supportive, so for a while we used it as the positioning for Europe, with the exception of London. And then we merged with BBDP in Europe, and Jean-Marie Dru took the helm, and it was clear that if I wanted to pursue the ideas in the book I would need to leave. He obviously had a fierce philosophy and book of his own – Disruption – and no agency needs more than one good philosophy. Jean-Marie in his own way was very supportive too, and allowed me to leave the agency with the rights to the thinking and the book (note to agency authors: check your contract as to whom owns what), on my own terms. I left a month before the book came out, and started eatbigfish with four friends.