How Adam Morgan left their lane.
Adam Morgan left one of advertising’s senior planning roles in 1997 to understand how challengers compete when the odds favour someone else.
Adam Morgan came to advertising almost by accident.
The son of a diplomat, he grew up between Beijing, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa and China, and expected to follow his father into the Foreign Office. Instead, after studying Classics at Oxford, he took a job in advertising – and has since described himself as the worst account executive in the history of the discipline. Planning proved a considerably better fit.
Over the next 17 years, Morgan rose through the industry to become Joint European Planning Director at TBWA\Chiat\Day. His work put him close to brands including Apple, Sony PlayStation and Absolut at a moment when each was challenging assumptions about its category.
Then, in 1997, he stepped outside the agency world to pursue a question of his own.
How does a brand with fewer resources than the market leader compete – and win?
The research became Eating the Big Fish. Published in 1999, the book popularised the idea of the Challenger Brand and gave businesses a framework for competing through a different mindset rather than trying to behave like smaller versions of the leader. Morgan founded eatbigfish to put that thinking into practice.
The question has kept evolving. The Pirate Inside, A Beautiful Constraint and Overthrow explored what challenger thinking looks like inside organisations and under pressure. More recently, The Extraordinary Cost of Dull has turned his attention to what happens when brands with every reason to be interesting choose safety instead – working with Peter Field, Dr Karen Nelson-Field, Jon Evans and others to put a commercial cost on mediocrity.
Morgan built his career studying businesses that cannot afford to follow the obvious route.
Then he left the agency world to become one himself.
