Deviant's Advantage How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets

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 theMathews, Ryan is the author of 'Deviant's Advantage How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets' with ISBN 9781400050000 and ISBN 1400050006.