A Longer look at The Long Tail

The Long Tail speaks at length of the death of the hit. No more will the hit movie, DVD, CD or single reap such huge reward as we've grown accustomed to. Chris Anderson cites the best all-time one week sales of NSYNC's No Strings Attached in March of 2000 as the last of the big hits. Anderson does good to not shut the door on hits entirely. We all have examples of mega-movies and singles that pulled in huge box office scores. Avatar (2009) and The Dark Knight (2008) come to mind immediately. Avatar did over $300 million in one week, while The Dark Knight pulled in over $600 million just in the United States.

So the hit is not dead just wounded and may never recover. We've seen the effects of the Long Tail first and foremost in music. Peer to peer networks which enabled easy file sharing started it off. Napster did its part and the music industry was changed forever. Considering that only a very small fraction of music ever makes it onto store shelves it's not surprising that presenting consumers with more variety would produce this effect. Variety enables consumers to stray away from the hits in a brick and mortar store to sounds that reflect their taste more closely. As Anderson says, "..suddenly the hit gives way to the micro hit...top 40 now becomes top 40,000 or 400,000..)

For media products, this move makes perfect sense even today. With the internet freely (so to speak) available and electronic storage costs so low any product that can be delivered electronically can also be stocked regardless of expected sales. Anderson explains that there are three levels of retailers or "Three steps to infinite variety." Physical stores such as Tower Records, which sees a profit cut-off point for items which do not move a minimum of units. Hybrid retailers such as Amazon offer both worlds by leveraging physical warehouse storage space, fast shipping as will as electronic storage and delivery wherever possible.

Pure digital retailers like Rhapsody are able to take full advantage of the head and tail through non-existent additional overhead costs for carrying products (music in this case) quite a ways down the tail. Large retailers are beginning to understand the power of this concept and are moving towards a hybrid approach. For Example Target and Walmart now offer a much larger variety of products on their websites than you find in their stores.

Another excellent concept that Anderson writes about is the Long Tail theory in shaping company or product image. The typical consumer will no longer simply wander into their nearest Sears to buy a new washer and dryer. They first Google it. The top hits that Google returns to them will more than likely help shape their purchase decision. The example that Anderson uses speaks of "Dell Hell." We can still see the effects of a single person's blog shaping the public image of computer retail giant, Dell. In the words of Anderson,"The ants have megaphones."

Anita Elberse offers an opposing viewpoint in her Harvard Business review article, Should you invest in the Long Tail? Elberse cites sales information from Rhapsody and Quickflix to say that the tail continues to grow longer and flatter. This leads to the conclusion that marketing and sales teams everywhere should not shift focus away from the "Hit" to the "Long Tail". While I agree that all focus should not drift away from the mainstream, it still stands to reason that we should remain aware of the long tail and work to exploit it. There is no denying that the bulk of sales for many companies that are quite a way down the tail are still in the head. With that said though, Rhapsody cannot ignore the tail that accounts for 20-25% of sales.

Fandotech Blog

A couple of years back my company Fuss & O'Neill Technologies (Fandotech) started a blog. We've tried various initiatives, rewards, etc. to get employees and management to blog. The blog topics are mostly technology related and have generated some traffic. I would like to take this opportunity to get some outside input on our blog, keeping in mind that we've now all read chapters 5 and 15 of Scott's New Rules of Marketing and PR. Please provide feedback as a reply to this post. Is the blog too corporate? Does its content drive readership? What, in your opinion, can we do to make it better?

Don't Trust Anyone over 50

While consumers over 50 account for half of the population and spend more money than any other age group on products, the 18-34 demographic is still the most coveted by advertisers. This is mostly due to the perception by advertisers that once their product is associated with the Alpha-boomers they are forever doomed to that demographic.

For this reason the viewership for consumers past 50 is not even tracked. It seems that advertisers and companies are giving up a substantial opportunity to attract a large and possibly untapped portion of the market for fear of being pigeon holed and loosing other key demographics. The article mentions that the perception of "old" is changing. Will this be enough to start tracking alpha-boomers viewing habits? Can we market to 55+ demographics without loosing market in other demographics?

The Long Tail

RonAmok brings up an interesting way of shifting thinking of the long tail from sales in the tail to more of a brand or image management strategy in the long tail. From a pure media perspective companies may be better served by releasing small bytes of information more often rather than focusing on single large media releases. The Long Tail will overall result in more exposure using the smaller, more often released strategy. These smaller, more often released media bytes increase the chance for the double-value curve that is discussed.

Chris Anderson does a good job of summarizing his 250 page book into a 9 minute video clip. The Long Tail concept is powerful and will become only more powerful as new markets enter the Long Tail. The new long tail markets represent the industries where technology continues to reduce cost of delivery. A good example of this is from Anderson’s book, where he discusses the desktop fabricator, which is capable of creating an object to any specifications.

Let's Begin with Marketing!

Whether talking about churning ads through television or leveraging blogs marketing is best summed up with Peter Drucker’s statement, “The aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.”

In my opinion, the video “What is Marketing?” was quite entertaining and spoke to plenty of the stigmas surrounding professionals in the marketing space. In its simplest form, marketing is the act of bringing products to the market, once in the market the laws of supply and demand take over. The self-proclaimed marketer in the video explores this simple definition a bit deeper explaining that marketers leave this well-defined world and turn “evil” when they aim at bringing a product to market that is known to be detrimental to the good of mankind. From this perspective it seems that this clip serves as a simple platform in stating that while some marketers are “evil” most are good.

The second video, “A Short Introduction to Marketing” is just that. It serves as an introduction to marketing in its simplest form. It introduces the CVP principle and the four P’s of marketing. The video then goes on to examine a simple example of a marketing practice and the cyclical nature of planning, marketing, bringing the product to market and gaining feedback. This look at marketing is focused on the traditional approach without accounting for the recent paradigm shift in marketing to the internet.

Professor Philip Kotler presents his definition of marketing as (CCDVTMP) create, communicate and deliver value to a target market at a profit. What’s interesting about this video is the discussion on managing the brand for an organization. What we’ve seen recently is a departure from this school of thought. In The Long Tail, Anderson talks about the recent “marketing” campaign by GM to boost sales of the Tahoe during the gasoline price spike in 2006. In this case the decision was made to create a forum for any and everybody to upload potential commercials to the internet on GM’s website. This was originally thought to be detrimental when multiple negative ads were posted on the site, yet proved to be quite effective in boosting sales. This move took the years of brand management that GM has invested in and threw it out the window, yet proved effective.

Seth Godin presents marketing as, spreading your idea to your audience. Godin starts out with a brief look at where marketing used to flourish. Television. Seth then explores the shift in marketing to targeting the innovators and early adopters since the early and late majority who are exceptionally good at ignoring marketing efforts. “Sell to people who are listening and maybe they’ll tell their friends.” The riskiest thing that a company can do is be average and safe.

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When the Customer Became Important

My Thoughts on Webster’s Expanding Your Network article:

Traditional marketing is antiquated. The new focus of marketing as stated in the article is the focus of all stakeholders at creating value for the customers and developing the company’s brand. That was a good point in the article that many companies focus their marketing efforts on things that they can control. This is reminiscent of the Long Tail point about Dell. Dell pumps millions into marketing every year touting its customer service and technical support, yet consumers can go online and search “Dell Hell” and get over 42,000 pages of results from Google. In the case of Dell, stakeholders are better suites at working to fix the customer service and support issues which will strengthen the brand through the magic of all of us “ants with megaphones”[1] out here on the internet.

My Thoughts on Haeckel’s The Post Industrial Manager article:

In a post-industrial age when it can no longer be predicted what consumers will want, how does a manager create value? Haeckel theorizes that this calls for a shift away from the make and sell managerial framework of the 20^th century to a sense and respond framework. The most daunting task in introducing this framework is thought to be getting buy in from the managers that are stuck in the old ways and unable to see the paradigm shift. For these situations Haeckel theorizes that the best method is to introduce the new methods, processes and innovations and let management work backwards to build the management frameworks to support them. This is done to create value for the customer. Haeckel uses the Xerox example to illustrate this.

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[1] Anderson