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

Product Description

In The Deviant's Advantage, Ryan Mathews & Watts Wacker demonstrate how ideas create increasingly profitable markets as they move from The Fringe, to the Edge, to the Realm of the Cool, to the Next Big Thing, to Social Convention. The book tracks the products & people haunting the fringes of sex, science, art, language, faith, war & marketing, branding & macro-economics. Tomorrow's commercial success is an obsession in the mind of today's deviant. Las Vegas is a perfect example: it morphed from a bus stop in the desert to a neon ' Sin City' & finally into a family vacation destination. In 1945 a handsome, murderous sociopath called Benny ' Bugsy' Siegel decided to build a luxury gambling oasis in the desert. At the time, Las Vegas was a crossroads in the middle of the desert. Siegel understood the emerging desire for escape in the American psyche
- & out of nothing, created what became an enormous gambling haven. Las Vegas has now transformed itself into a gigantic family-oriented theme park, albeit one with slots & roulette wheels. It's become a holiday destination for the entire family, not just a place that fathers sneak off to. Las Vegas moved from the Fringe (Bugsy's original vision), to the Edge (the first hotel), to the Realm of the Cool (where everyone wanted to go), to the Next Big Thing (where everyone went), to Social Convention.