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The Deviant's Advantage: How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets
Don’t consider yourself deviant? Well, that just may be a career breaker. Odds are the idea or product that will transform your business or industry tomorrow is out there right now, hiding in the shadows of the Fringe, raw, messy, untamed, and just waiting to be exploited. Trapping, taming, and marketing it is the key to burying your competition and staying ahead of your market.
Deviance is nothing more than a marked separation from the norm and is the source of innovation, the kind of breakthrough thinking that creates new markets and tumbles traditional ones. Positive deviation is an inexhaustible font of new ideas, products, and services. It’s the source of all creative thinking and dynamic new market development and ultimately the basis of all incremental profit.
The Deviant’s Advantage describes how deviance proceeds along a traceable trajectory from the Fringe, where it originates but has zero commercial potential; to the Edge, where word of mouth creates a limited audience; to the Realm of the Cool, where the buzz and market momentum really start to build; to the Next Big Thing, where demand is honed and intensifies; finally landing at Social Convention, the heart of the mass market.
Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker, two of America’s most respected futurists, trace the “Path of the Devox” (the voice, spirit, or incarnation of deviant ideas, products, and individuals), using it as a way to explain how and why:
* Christian fundamentalism morphed from college Bible studies to Republican party king-making
* Reebok cares more about what’s on the feet of kids in Detroit and Philadelphia than what the so-hip-it-hurts set is wearing in New York or on Rodeo Drive
* Napster exploded from an idea germinating inside a sixteen-year-old to a movement with 60 million subscribers that very nearly destroyed the music industry
* Hugh Hefner went from America’s most public pornographer to a cultural icon with decidedly Puritan sensibilities
Mathews and Wacker also look at what happens to formerly deviant products and ideas after they are replaced by the next wave from the Fringe—how they morph into Cliché (where their commercial potential may actually increase), become Icons or even Archetypes, or fade into Oblivion, and how you can profitably manage even a fading concept.
Looking for the next big idea for your business? Then it’s past time to quit staring at the Social Convention for inspiration and start scouring the Fringes of society. Tomorrow’s breakthrough concept is lurking out there right now, in the mind of a deviant individual. Your choice is simple: find it and exploit it, or be buried by those who do.
From the Hardcover edition.
Deviance is nothing more than a marked separation from the norm and is the source of innovation, the kind of breakthrough thinking that creates new markets and tumbles traditional ones. Positive deviation is an inexhaustible font of new ideas, products, and services. It’s the source of all creative thinking and dynamic new market development and ultimately the basis of all incremental profit.
The Deviant’s Advantage describes how deviance proceeds along a traceable trajectory from the Fringe, where it originates but has zero commercial potential; to the Edge, where word of mouth creates a limited audience; to the Realm of the Cool, where the buzz and market momentum really start to build; to the Next Big Thing, where demand is honed and intensifies; finally landing at Social Convention, the heart of the mass market.
Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker, two of America’s most respected futurists, trace the “Path of the Devox” (the voice, spirit, or incarnation of deviant ideas, products, and individuals), using it as a way to explain how and why:
* Christian fundamentalism morphed from college Bible studies to Republican party king-making
* Reebok cares more about what’s on the feet of kids in Detroit and Philadelphia than what the so-hip-it-hurts set is wearing in New York or on Rodeo Drive
* Napster exploded from an idea germinating inside a sixteen-year-old to a movement with 60 million subscribers that very nearly destroyed the music industry
* Hugh Hefner went from America’s most public pornographer to a cultural icon with decidedly Puritan sensibilities
Mathews and Wacker also look at what happens to formerly deviant products and ideas after they are replaced by the next wave from the Fringe—how they morph into Cliché (where their commercial potential may actually increase), become Icons or even Archetypes, or fade into Oblivion, and how you can profitably manage even a fading concept.
Looking for the next big idea for your business? Then it’s past time to quit staring at the Social Convention for inspiration and start scouring the Fringes of society. Tomorrow’s breakthrough concept is lurking out there right now, in the mind of a deviant individual. Your choice is simple: find it and exploit it, or be buried by those who do.
From the Hardcover edition.
- GenresBusiness
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
3 people are currently reading
59 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 28, 2014
It took me a long time to decide how many stars to give this book. Arguments can be made for anywhere between two and four.
On one hand, the construct that authors Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker propose is intriguing. They propose that all ideas have a life-cycle that progresses through five main stages: The Fringe, The Edge, The Next Big Thing, The Realm of the Cool, and Social Convention. I won't go into the details of these stages both because it would spoil parts of the book and because I'm not sure I can do them justice in a few sentences. Suffice it to say, their ideas, at least on the macro level, seem fairly brilliant.
On the other hand, the book itself struggles to demonstrate this very interesting theoretical construct in a meaningful or applicable way. Each chapter tends to start out by making some very grand claims and asserting some very broad assumptions and possibilities, but when it comes to backing said claims and assumptions up, Mathews and Wacker tend to get lost in anecdotes and asides about the rise and fall of various businesses and business models without ever quite making their point.
The book is divided into three large chunks:
"Deviant Evolution" is the best of the three. It describes in detail the theoretical underpinnings of the deviant life-cycle. When I got to the end of this section, I felt as though I understood what the authors were driving at, and I was excited to read about concrete examples and the practical applicability of the theory.
"Deviance in Life" is probably the worst of the three. The authors really take their time here and dwell on such topics as how the devox (their all-encompassing term for the deviant idea in all of its forms) has affected language, art, science, and society as a whole. If you are reading this book just for an appreciation of the theory, you might enjoy this. If, like me, you are reading this book for some insights with real-world application, this section offers very little help.
"Deviance in Business" tries valiantly to redeem the book with a smattering of practical advice. Looking at the table of contents, section titles like "The Deviant Product" and "The Deviant's Toolbox" seem to promise just that, but again, the authors fall short of offering much practical advice for how to harness the power of the devox as an individual or a business owner.
Conclusion
It is unclear if the authors feel that the devox is too abstract to nail down and use in a practical fashion or if they just couldn't be bothered to give any practical advice to those of us in the trenches. By the end, I was partly disappointed that I had only a few solid actionable notes for how to improve my own marketing practices and partly frustrated with how long the authors had lead me in circles, telling me stories about historic companies and their clients.
I'm going with 3/5 stars because I think there is a lot of potential here, and it is likely a theory that will stick in my head for a long time. However, the book struggles to apply its point to the real world. The authors tried valiantly to only use examples of actual companies and ideas rather than resorting to postulating, but I think that the theory itself is just too messy to ever be seen clearly with only real world examples.
On one hand, the construct that authors Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker propose is intriguing. They propose that all ideas have a life-cycle that progresses through five main stages: The Fringe, The Edge, The Next Big Thing, The Realm of the Cool, and Social Convention. I won't go into the details of these stages both because it would spoil parts of the book and because I'm not sure I can do them justice in a few sentences. Suffice it to say, their ideas, at least on the macro level, seem fairly brilliant.
On the other hand, the book itself struggles to demonstrate this very interesting theoretical construct in a meaningful or applicable way. Each chapter tends to start out by making some very grand claims and asserting some very broad assumptions and possibilities, but when it comes to backing said claims and assumptions up, Mathews and Wacker tend to get lost in anecdotes and asides about the rise and fall of various businesses and business models without ever quite making their point.
The book is divided into three large chunks:
"Deviant Evolution" is the best of the three. It describes in detail the theoretical underpinnings of the deviant life-cycle. When I got to the end of this section, I felt as though I understood what the authors were driving at, and I was excited to read about concrete examples and the practical applicability of the theory.
"Deviance in Life" is probably the worst of the three. The authors really take their time here and dwell on such topics as how the devox (their all-encompassing term for the deviant idea in all of its forms) has affected language, art, science, and society as a whole. If you are reading this book just for an appreciation of the theory, you might enjoy this. If, like me, you are reading this book for some insights with real-world application, this section offers very little help.
"Deviance in Business" tries valiantly to redeem the book with a smattering of practical advice. Looking at the table of contents, section titles like "The Deviant Product" and "The Deviant's Toolbox" seem to promise just that, but again, the authors fall short of offering much practical advice for how to harness the power of the devox as an individual or a business owner.
Conclusion
It is unclear if the authors feel that the devox is too abstract to nail down and use in a practical fashion or if they just couldn't be bothered to give any practical advice to those of us in the trenches. By the end, I was partly disappointed that I had only a few solid actionable notes for how to improve my own marketing practices and partly frustrated with how long the authors had lead me in circles, telling me stories about historic companies and their clients.
I'm going with 3/5 stars because I think there is a lot of potential here, and it is likely a theory that will stick in my head for a long time. However, the book struggles to apply its point to the real world. The authors tried valiantly to only use examples of actual companies and ideas rather than resorting to postulating, but I think that the theory itself is just too messy to ever be seen clearly with only real world examples.
March 27, 2022
Like many marketing / business books written in the early 2000s this doesn't have the advantage of hindsight to see what rapidly changing things were good and what was nonsense. However, the core thinking is strong- mavericks and deviants plot their own course and exist on the fringe until eventually the mainstream catches on and the once freakish and alien becomes corporate and everyday. Some nice quotes but a little TMI about weird sex web forums.
June 18, 2009
Since I am a staunch advocate and practitioner of freeing poetic nuance from mere verse, or even novels, this book sounds an important note re poetics applied to marketing itself. One usually only sees hints of the "revenge of art" in the marketplace via imagery, the smart successful film, or the strikingly witty commercial. The more we see this in all aspects of text and its marketing, the better off we'll all be.
March 30, 2013
A should-read book on creating and building new products for knowledge workers and entrepreneurs.
November 9, 2015
Dove back into this book for a launch project that I am working on. The innovation from the fringe to the mainstream is still very relevant.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews