The stairs to our company’s fourth-floor loft posed a challenge for the dominatrixes. Many were wearing vertiginous Jimmy Choos and Christian Louboutins, and there was a bit of grumbling by the time they got to the top. I suppose they’re more used to dishing out suffering than enduring it themselves. As they made the trek through our building, they raised hardly an eyebrow from our staffers.

At Sense Worldwide, a branding consultancy specializing in working with extreme consumers, we’re accustomed to individuals who are a million miles away from that “regular customer.” You know, the ones who sit in focus groups and fill out online surveys. For us, one day, it’s dominatrixes; the next, it’s obsessive compulsives, teddy-bear enthusiasts, prescription-drug addicts, or Nigerian hackers.

We listen to dominatrixes, obsessive compulsives, teddy-bear enthusiasts, drug addicts, and Nigerian hackers.

James, Maria, and Jean-Robert do our recruitment. They’re ridiculously sanguine about hunting down rare and extraordinary people. Today, I asked them to find us the top cocktail mixologists in Seoul, Korea. “No particular age or gender?” was all James asked. We seek out these obsessives, maniacs and eccentrics because they can help us get to big, breakthrough ideas. Some of them can show us how mainstream consumers will behave in a few years. Some of them have extreme needs that no product on the market can meet–so they modify them, or make their own. Some of them reject a whole category. You can learn a lot about mobile phones by talking to a power user. You can learn even more by talking to somebody who’s deliberately never bought one.

These extreme users have a willingness to experiment that’s far beyond the capacity of any design agency. And because they’re improving the thing that they love, they’re not going to charge you by the hour. We recently worked with some Brazilian transsexuals on hair-removal products, looking at ways of making the process less painful. I can assure you, we had their full attention. Some are still sending us ideas.

When we get extreme users together in a room, we often sit them down with the top design and R&D wizards from our clients. We ask our clients to bring the ideas they could never sell internally, because radical people appreciate radical ideas.

Every good designer has felt the pang of watching a truly revolutionary concept being pulled apart by the passive-aggressive mouth-breathers who make up most focus groups. “This doesn’t taste like cola,” they said about Red Bull. “Executive chairs are made of leather,” they said about Aerons. “Only secretaries have keyboards on their desks,” they said about PCs. All kinds of great ideas, from the Walkman to nacho chips, died in research with average consumers. That’s because regular people don’t like new things much. You know that, you’ve read Blink.

But what Malcolm Gladwell didn’t tell you is that there are people out there who will buy a great new idea. Perhaps they’ll even have it for you. Clubbers loved Red Bull: It helped them rave all night. A 4’11” lady loved the Aeron chair prototype so much that production was delayed until she was happy she could reach the controls.