Advertising books

Legacy brands are struggling. The hand-to-hand combat for advantage has become a zero-sum game - producing small share gains and losses but nothing to bring about sensational new growth. This book shows why businesses, marketers and entrepreneurs need to break free from their 'mainstream inhibition' and turn their attention to the margins - to confront, evaluate and embrace the 'strangeness' of behaviours, ideas and ways of life at the fringes. Why? Because marginal behaviours can break through and take off. They can go mainstream. They can unleash 'consumer-driven distruption', promoting new innovation, new routes to market, new winners and losers - and new growth.Using original research and analysis of the brands that have successfully backed marginal behaviours, From Marginal to Mainstream provides a framework for understanding and evaluating this non-obvious, untapped potential. Marginal behaviours may be unpromising, untested, weird, even sometimes repulsive - yet they can point the way to the future. Today's margins are tomorrow's pot of gold - if you know where and how to look.

This volume presents selected papers from the 7th Annual Consumer Culture Theory Conference held at Oxford University in August, 2012. The 18 papers in the volume together capture the latest research within this qualitative paradigm of consumer studies. Topics addressed cover a wide gamut including immigrant consumption experiences, gift-giving, sharing, transgressive gender roles, attachments to special possessions in online games and real life, the homeless consumer experience, disposition of possessions, privacy, metaphor analysis, sustainable consumption, alcohol consumption, cosmetics usage, and the negative consequences of sponsoring children in the less affluent world.