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

Legacy brands are struggling. To put it simply, mainstream brand thinking is holding back mainstream brand growth. Businesses need to turn their attention to those brands who are playing at the fringes and learn from their business techniques.

Mainstream brands are besieged when it comes to being innovative, developing new products and taking new services or goods to market. Legacy brands seek out small and comfortable advantages within their market sectors and while this may produce a small market share uplift, it will never bring about sensational brand growth.

From Marginal to Mainstream shows why businesses, marketers and product development teams need to break through mainstream inhibition and turn their attention to those brands that are currently in the margins - to confront, evaluate and embrace the strangeness of brand strategies, behaviours, ideas, marketing and and the way of life at the fringes. This may be an unpromising, untested, weird and even sometimes frightening place, yet studying the behaviour of marginal brands - what they get right, how they engage with customers, how they develop products - can point the way to new innovation, new routes to market and exciting new category creation.

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