From Marginal to Mainstream : Why Tomorrow?s Brand Growth Will Come from the Fringes - and How to Get There First

Legacy brands are struggling. The hand-to-hand combat for advantage has become a zero-sum game - producing small share gains and losses but nothing to bring about sensational new growth.

This book shows why businesses, marketers and entrepreneurs need to break free from their 'mainstream inhibition' and turn their attention to the margins - to confront, evaluate and embrace the 'strangeness' of behaviours, ideas and ways of life at the fringes.

Why? Because marginal behaviours can break through and take off. They can go mainstream. They can unleash 'consumer-driven disruption', promoting new innovation, new routes to market, new winners and losers - and new growth.

Using original research and analysis of the brands that have successfully backed marginal behaviours, From Marginal to Mainstream provides a framework for understanding and evaluating this non-obvious, untapped potential.

Marginal behaviours may be unpromising, untested, weird, even sometimes repulsive - yet they can point the way to the future.

Today's margins are tomorrow's pot of gold - if you know where and how to look.

Dr Helen Edwards straddles the business and academic worlds of marketing through teaching, writing and consultancy. She is an award-winning columnist at Marketing Week, an adjunct associate Professor of Marketing at London Business School, and sits on the board of the UK Effies. She is also the author of Creating Passion Brands, published by Kogan Page and is based in London, UK.

She founded Passionbrand in 2005 - a boutique brand consultancy based in London, combining strategic and creative skills. Clients include Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Avon, Tesco, MetLife, Nationwide, EDF Energy, BBC Worldwide, Smith & Nephew, The World Economic Forum.