The Deviant's Advantage: How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets - Hardcover

Mathews, Ryan; Wacker, Watts

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609609580 ISBN 13: 9780609609583

Publisher: Crown Business, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover

“Where do breakthrough ideas come from? Where do you look to find the next great business concept, the next box-office bonanza, the next Broadway smash, the next social revolution? As this fun, insightful, and brilliant book makes clear, if you want to be ahead of the curve of change, you’ve got to spend time on the fringes of society. The spot-on lesson: Don’t be afraid of deviants—embrace them! They are creating the future before it arrives for the rest of us.” —Alan M. Webber, founding editor, Fast Company

“Leave it to Wacker and Mathews to bring much-deserved honor to deviant thinking and to insert it into the business world. They not only question several fundamental business norms, but they pretty much condemn them to that vast purgatory that exists between breakaway success and spectacular failure—which is precisely where conservative, non-deviant businesses usually end up.” —Scott Bedbury, author of A Brand New World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century and CEO, Brandstream

“In The Deviant’s Advantage, Watts Wacker and Ryan Mathews offer insights and ideas that are truly ‘out of the box.’ But make no mistake—their unorthodox theories connecting the concept of deviance with innovation and creativity ring true for many businesses.”—O. Burtch Drake, president-CEO, American Association of Advertising Agencies

“The Deviant’s Advantage is the best book ever written about how companies can benefit from strange new ideas and the oddballs and misfits who dream them up. Mathews and Wacker write so well that, although I should have been doing other things, I kept turning the pages. They provide compelling stories and arguments about how and why companies can benefit from fringe ideas and people, but at the same time, warn both companies and people of the hazards of embracing deviance.” —Robert I. Sutton, professor, Stanford University, codirector of the Stanford Engineering School Center for Work, Technology and Organization,
and author of Weird Ideas That Work

“Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker will challenge both the right and left sides of your brain. The opportunity to harness genius is all around you but requires dramatic stretching of peripheral vision to bring the fringe into focus. If you haven’t yet made the observation that everything, including time itself, is accelerating, you most certainly will after reading The Deviant’s Advantage. But you’ll also be challenged to examine new dimensions of your potential for personal development by coming to understand that business doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s part of our overall culture. A new breed of leaders is embracing the apparent contradictions of our society and harnessing what seem like emerging aberrant concepts to shape the future.” —Randy J. Rose, president, Energizer Battery, Inc.

About the Author

RYAN MATHEWS is a futurist and principal of FirstMatter, a trend-watching consulting firm. Hailed as one of the few true philosophers in modern business, Mathews has been profiled in publications from Fast Company to Wired. He is a coauthor of the bestselling The Myth of Excellence and lives in Detroit, Michigan.

WATTS WACKER, also a futurist and principal of FirstMatter, has been profiled in such publications as Fast Company and Forbes and was called “one of the 50 smartest people in the business world” by the Financial Times. He is a coauthor of The 500-Year Delta and The Visionary’s Handbook. He lives in Westport, Connecticut.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown Business
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0609609580
• ISBN 13: 9780609609583
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288