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Laba Business School,
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Helen Edwards, a marketing consultant who advises brands including Johnson & Johnson, Wella and Nando’s, and is also an adjunct professor at London Business School (LBS), has long studied the impact of cultural change on branding. Polyphasic sleeping, veganism, biohacking and freebirthing are just a few examples of marginal behaviours that could become more popular thanks to technological and cultural changes, argues Helen Edwards in her new book From Marginal to Mainstream .
In an interview with Laba Business School, Edwards talks about:
how to reverse misconceptions about products;
the role of technology in transitioning marginal behaviours into the mainstream;
why Generation Z is more open to new products;
how marketers can identify cultural shifts to differentiate their brands.
Why is the ability to spot rare, marginal behaviors in society becoming increasingly important for marketers?
The era of Clayton Christensen’s breakthrough innovations —technological innovations that generate breakthrough business growth—is over. The prevailing belief is that the low-hanging fruit of technological innovation has been harvested and that any further gains will be small. So large companies are starting to look elsewhere for breakthroughs.
When I work with companies looking for growth georgia telephone number data one problem I see is that they often think too narrowly because it’s less risky. They focus on the competition, thinking about how they can gain market share here, or shelf space there… That’s a safe approach, but it won’t lead to breakthrough success.
The largest generation in history – Generation Z – is behaving in a completely different way. They are much more curious, less judgmental, more open, more global and socially connected through social media.
When you combine these traits and leverage social media’s ability to spot marginal behaviors, you see an opportunity for growth. Instead of looking for supply-side innovation, look for consumer-driven disruption .
What is the best example of a company using marginal behavior in its marketing?
I think it's Nike. In 1968, someone in the United States was arrested for jogging - the alleged official reason was "improper use of a public road."
Jogging itself simply wasn’t practiced as a sport. One reason was that people didn’t have the need for it. Their jobs were often quite physically demanding and their lifestyles were more active.
Bill Bowerman was then a track coach in Oregon, and in the late 1960s he went on a fact-finding mission to New Zealand, where he was invited to join a running club in Auckland. He had never heard of such a thing. During his travels, Bowerman learned about the benefits of running for heart health—and brought the idea back to America.
He and the University of Oregon conducted a study on the effects of jogging on heart health. They easily recruited people for the experiment—and it caught on.
Bowerman quickly realized that traditional athletic shoes weren’t suitable for running, so he tried to create something better. He teamed up with a former runner he coached, Phil Knight, and together they founded the sportswear company Blue Ribbon. In 1971, they changed their name to Nike.
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So Nike was born at the very beginning of the exercise revolution, which was very quickly finding its fans. If you think about all the categories and brands that benefited from the sports revolution—think equipment, sportswear, and footwear—it’s a huge number of companies. Bowerman saw something halfway around the world. Phil Knight once said that they didn’t create the sports revolution, but they certainly capitalized on it .
So you have to look at people and look at what they do. We have to think about the added value for consumers and present it to a wider population, instead of thinking that our company can create an innovative product on its own. That's probably not going to happen.
Is this a uniquely Western phenomenon or can we see it all over the world?
To put it simply, we often say that we live in a global world, but that is not entirely true. We will always see some marginal behaviors that are socially accepted or more developed in some parts of the world, but are practically nonexistent in others.
Homeopathy emerged in Germany and is more popular there and in Eastern Europe, but is received differently in other parts of the world. The homeopathy industry may never make a breakthrough because there is a lot of resistance from the conventional clinical community . In the case of veganism or mindfulness, I see global potential.
How to identify factors that make marginal behaviors more acceptable to a wider audience?
To better understand these factors, we have identified eight “beacons”: clues that help us understand this or that social phenomenon. Looking at it through the prism of these signals helps us understand whether it has a chance of becoming mainstream. One such signal is accelerators.
If there's a change in the cultural or regulatory environment, that affects how people view certain behavior. COVID has been an accelerator of polyphasic sleep, which is not sleeping a solid 8 hours a night, but breaking it down into intervals that your body responds to best. I've seen studies that say that's more natural for your body. Remote work, especially for office workers, has made that possible.
