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

Wacker, Watts; Mathews, Ryan

 
9781400050000: The Deviant's Advantage: How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1400050006 ISBN 13: 9781400050000
Verlag: Three Rivers Pr, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Two modern-day futurists explore the ways in which innovative ideas from the fringe of business promote mainstream profitability, demonstrating how hot new ideas move from that fringe through such states as The Edge, Realm of the Cool, The Next Big Thing, The Mainstream, and beyond. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.


From the Hardcover edition.

Aus dem Klappentext

Don t be afraid of deviants. They just may save your business.

In today's challenging and sometimes puzzling business environment, deviance equals innovation--the kind of breakthrough thinking that creates new markets and tumbles traditional ones. In The Deviant's Advantage, two of America's most respected futurists show how this deviance proceeds along a traceable trajectory, explaining 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
Hugh Hefner, the creator of Playboy, transformed into a cultural icon with decidedly Puritan sensibilities

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Greetings, Fellow Deviants


Mad has become mainstream. Either that or society has sunk to our level.

--John Ficarra, coeditor, Mad magazine

Mad isn't the only deviant to find its way to the center of Social Convention. Turn on your television and you can witness corporate America's commercial embrace of the dark side in living color and Dolby surround sound. A clip from Easy Rider--the 1960s paean to outlaw biking, the counterculture, casual sex, and selling cocaine--is being used to hawk Diners Club and Diet Pepsi. "I Put a Spell on You," a 1954 song by Screamin' Jay Hawkins--the singer once rumored to be a cannibal who, wearing a bone through his nose to complement the ones in his necklace, began his act by rising out of a coffin--is now a jingle pushing Pringles, the most sanitized, processed, standardized incarnation of a potato in history. Push away from the edge a bit further and commercial life starts getting really weird. Former presidential candidate Bob Dole appears in Pepsi ads talking about his "little blue friend," parodying his role as a spokesman for Viagra. If the idea of a senior statesman marketing himself as the poster boy for erectile dysfunction doesn't strike you as quite odd enough, go online (cajohns.com) and you can find CaJohn Fiery Foods of Cleveland, Ohio, a fire extinguisher firm that also markets Vicious Viper, a laboratory-enhanced "hot" sauce that is actually too hot for most people to eat. The weirdness is out there--alive and well--and lots of people are finding ways to make money off it.

Despite the increasingly surly growls of bear marketers, we still live in one of the most economically prosperous periods in history. And the truth--whether we like to admit it or not--is that we owe everything we know, have, and think to the long line of deviants who have come before us.

Most of you reading this book no doubt work for companies founded by a deviant, even (or perhaps especially) if you're self-employed. Some are born to deviance, but everyone can profit from studying how deviance is transforming society and creating market opportunities. Deviance is the backbeat of commerce, the rhythm of innovation that drives wealth creation and defines attitudes and values. Socially, we shun the deviant while remaining addicted to the fruits of their sometimes misguided labors. By their very nature deviants define the essence of social and commercial change, creating new products and markets in their wake. This might explain why today there's such a big market for deviants (we should know, we're part of it), as long as they're not full-time employees.

The Fringe has arrived center stage in everything from extreme sports (skateboarding, snowboarding, mountain biking, and even the ill-fated XFL), to extreme foods (both the title and theme of a popular Food Network cable show), to even, yes, something called extreme pornography (which seems to involve midgets, simultaneous multiple couplings, and the creative use of large lengths of surgical tubing). Extreme media has moved beyond the trailer-trash confines of rampant Jerry Springerism to embrace "reality television" in all its forms, from the media-famous, depixilated naked Richard Hatch of the original Survivor series; to the sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll of MTV's Road Rules and Real World; to the sleaziness of Temptation Island, where people compete for the right to debase themselves and others in front of a national audience; to the star-crossed millionaire marriage of Darva Conger and Rick Rockwell. If you're not seeing a pattern here just wait for our next military engagement, complete with bombs whose warheads have been modified to hold cameras so that CNN viewers across the planet can be guaranteed the best seat in the house.

It isn't just society or the media that's a bit out of kilter; mainstream business culture has been equally infected by the deviance bug. We've seen what in a kinder, gentler time might have seemed like strange corporate bedfellows--the short union of Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble, two branding giants unused to seeking alliances; Federal Express and the United States Postal Service, in effect direct competitors; and Boeing and the U.S. Department of Defense, public and private sector--happily rolling together under the covers of capitalism. We've seen McDonald's pick up the mantle of animal rights activists with a vengeance by setting the global standards for laying-hen cages, and Madonna furthering her commercial empire by producing "What It Feels Like for a Girl," a video so violent it was banned as "entertainment" by both MTV and VH1--although both stations and a host of other broadcast media did air it (on a heavily marketed onetime basis) as "news." And let's not forget that once upon a time sports fans saw commercials as necessary evils, while today's post-Super Bowl analysis is more often than not about which ad--not which team--scored a touchdown.

ODD MAN OUT IS IN

Historically, most deviants have been content to express their deviance and go home. They still make their presence known on their own time and in their own voice, but they increasingly refuse to gracefully fade into the cultural wallpaper. We're writing this book at a time when Microsoft, one of America's most prominent corporations, is led by a college dropout (albeit a Harvard dropout); the last U.S. president of the twentieth century opted for hormones over an honored place in history; and music furthering negative racial and sexual stereotyping is all the rage. Business magazines like Fast Company, Business 2.0, and even Entrepreneur fill their pages with stories not of executives who just played the game well, but of those men and women who play the game differently or don't play at all. Instead of breaking the rules they make their own rules. Bill Gates did not see himself as the lucky guy chosen to be IBM's vendor for the operating system when IBM entered the PC market more than twenty years ago. Instead he used IBM as the springboard for building his own empire.

Something is happening in the corporate world and in the world at large that is changing both the timetable of change and every aspect of personal, social, and commercial engagement. Businesses are increasingly being challenged to rethink, redefine, and renew--often along fairly radical lines--or fail. This poses a significant challenge to most CEOs, who, having made their bones dealing with established markets, are being asked to produce constantly improving results in markets that simply don't respond to traditional approaches. The rules have changed while the conventional players are still on the field. In a world seemingly turned topsy-turvy, the odd man out is increasingly calling the shots--not a problem if you can translate the language of deviancy, but one hell of a challenge if you're mired in the quicksand of convention. It's painfully clear that there's more than a touch of madness in most successful methods, but it remains to be seen whether there's much method left in our collective madness. We believe not only that there is, but also that individuals and companies can learn to understand, control, and exploit the principles and lessons deviance has to offer.

Before we refine our hypothesis, we want to take some time to clarify language, beginning with the word deviance, which we suspect has a fairly negative connotation in your mind. As we use it, deviance is the conscious or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary following of any path other than the norm. In our lexicon deviance can have a positive impact, a negative impact, or an impact so marginal it appears to be nonexistent. Historically, deviance has been defined by "normal" people as the distance between themselves and the people, products, services, and ideas they...

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Verlag
Three Rivers Pr
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400050006
ISBN 13 
9781400050000
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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