The Wall Street Journal covers companies. Pirate Street Journal cover categories.
Each week, we pick three headlines worth paying attention to and break down the category underneath. Live every Thursday at 7 am PST / 10 am EST. See the news through a different lens. Keep reading in the Deep Dive Reports.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Here’s what we covered in this episode:
1. Marketing engineer is a great title. Market cap is the goal.
Profound, the AI marketing company that coined it, raised $180 million at a $1.8 billion value. It built a job board, a hackathon, and a podcast, all named after the title.
A market engineer designs a brand new category, the way a category designer does. A marketing engineer squeezes more money out of a category that already exists. Get the second one wrong and you engineer yourself, very cleverly, into a fight you cannot win.
Market share is how much of the pie you sell. Market cap is what the whole company is worth. Buy volume with discounts and share goes up while margins, the money you keep, go down.
We have seen this movie:
Sales engineers. The same title move hit in the early 1990s, right as sales software was born.
Marketing scientists. Stat models and PhDs, and the big conclusion was “get more distribution and awareness.”
Figma. Measures agents built, hours saved, and revenue. Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.
The best marketing team is worth so much that a buyer would pay for the team alone. Engineer that, not the agents.
2. Brands are throwing raves. The smart ones throw them for their best customers.
Spotify and LinkedIn threw a rave in New York for John Summit, a DJ who used to be an accountant, inside a fake office full of cubicles and Post-its. HBO threw one in a Brooklyn warehouse for its show Industry, with caviar on a timer. The Wall Street Journal asked about the ROI and printed zero ROI numbers.
This is plain old event marketing. People want to be with people.
The super of one is the super of nine: a person obsessed with one category is usually obsessed with about nine others. If your Superconsumer, the small group who care the most and spend the most in your category, loves dance music, the rave is the right room.
A party should pay for itself.
BeatBox Beverages. Party drinks in big group packs for young drinkers. Sold to Anheuser-Busch for $500 million.
Eddie’s New York launch. One pricey Manhattan room did a press launch, customer training, staff training, and a party. The brand went from $7.5 million to $35 million in about 14 months.
Anheuser-Busch. Shut down eight blocks of Chicago for 700 wholesalers, the independent companies that decide which beer hits the shelf.
Then film all of it, including the setup. The making-of video often beats the video. The ROI was never missing. The press counted posts instead of customers.
3. Britain’s best-selling car is a Chinese Range Rover look-alike at half the price
The best-selling car in Britain in September was the Jaecoo 7, made by China’s Chery. Brits call it the Temu Range Rover. It runs about $50,000, half the Range Rover it looks like. One London dealer planned to sell 350 in year one. He sold over 500 and will pass 1,200 this year. Three in five of his buyers came out of a BMW, Mercedes, or Range Rover.
Chery spent years as Jaguar Land Rover’s partner in China, building actual Range Rovers.
The category makes the brand. When the category shifts, loyalty becomes a jump ball. If the problem is “I want a Range Rover feel without a Range Rover bill,” the Chinese have the answer.
Old carmakers ran razors and blades: make a little on the car, make most of the money on parts, service, and loans. A newcomer has no blades, so it has to make money on the car itself.
Tesla. Built the most fun car you can buy and charged a premium to fund the factories.
Chery. Started cheap and is climbing up into luxury buyers.
Volvo, MG, and Range Rover. Already owned by companies from China and India.
China’s home market has too many factories and brutal prices, so the cars have to leave the country. For Western carmakers, standing still is an extinction-level event. They have to design the next category.
3 conversations to have about the news with the Pirate Eddie Bot and Pirate Christopher Bot
The bots take this week’s moves and run them against your category. They come with the founding tier and they jam 24/7, including the night before your budget meeting.
Grade your team on market cap, not activity. Give the bots your marketing team’s goals and make them sort each one: does it move what the company is worth, or just how busy you look? Figma counting AI agents is the warning label.
Throw the party your best customer would actually show up to. Describe your Superconsumer and have the bots list the nine other things that person is obsessed with, then design one event that does four jobs at once. Eddie’s Manhattan room did press, training, sales, and the party.
Find the jump ball in your category. Tell the bots what is shifting in your market and ask which customers stop being loyal when it does. Three in five Jaecoo buyers walked out of a luxury badge.
All three stories are the same story. A title, a party, and a badge are labels. The money goes to whoever owns the outcome underneath.
All three stories are the same story. The people who build trust win, and the people who guard it lose it.
Not a founding member yet? You can join here.
Arrrrrrr,
Category Pirates 🏴☠️
Eddie Yoon
Christopher Lochhead
