Several weeks ago John Maxwell from SFU posted a comment on my posting “Lessons from The Long Tail”.
I had every intention of responding straight away but clearly that didn’t happen. Yesterday John and I were on a Book Talks panel at Word on the Street, and it reminded me that I should get on with it and respond.
John says (I’ve excerpted here):
Quote: Hereís the thought: the Long Tail describes markets, but not marketING, and as such, it is descriptive, but not prescriptive in any strategically meaningful way.
John also admits to not having read the book. So I’ll point out that although the Long Tail describes the market (which is a market of multitudes vs. the one-size-fits-all model we’re used to), Anderson does talk a lot about marketing and how to effectively market along the tail–Rule #1: don’t focus only on the hits. (There are far more niche goods than hits. The cost of reaching those niches is falling dramatically due to a combo of digital distribution, powerful seach and filtering technologies, and broadband accessibility.)
John says:
Quote: We (consumers) have a finite amount of attention to pay to marketing messages, so one thing wins only by pushing something else out. And if that is the case, then it still makes more sense to play for the big numbersói.e., the ìshort headî is the more strategically valuable space, regardless of how interesting the long tail itself may be.
This would be true if the hits were still producing the big numbers. But they’re not.
The introduction of The Long Tail is all about the world of the blockbuster and why marketers need to move on–because we (consumers) already have.
The hits are the lens through which we understand the world: bestseller lists, top 10, platium record sales, etc. Anderson says, “Number one is still number one, but the sales that go with that are not what they once were.” So you can go ahead and focus only on the hits, but those numbers are dwindling rapidly.
Most of the top 50 bestselling albums of all time were recorded in the 70s and 80s. Every year network TV loses more and more of its audience to niche cable channels and the internet. This year saw the cancellation of UK’s Top of the Pops. A couple of books are hitting the really big numbers (Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter) but you don’t want to “need” the hits in order for your business to survive.
The old way of looking at products and audiences is “the pie is only so big” and if I want more marketshare it is at the expense of someone else. The new way to look at the pie is, “hey, there’s a whole other layer here.”
That other layer is all the stuff that, due to the lower distribution costs of digital materials, is now economical to distribute. The digital book shelf, where you sell and distribute digital works is one model, or the digital mail-order catalogue is the other, where you market works digitally but still distribute a physical product.
There are a lot more non-hits than hits. If the non-hits and total misses collectively are larger than the hits, and the costs to supply all your products vs. just the hits is the same, then why not make more money by offering everything.
People no longer only buy what’s available. They buy what they want. And if they can’t find exactly what they want right away, there’s the internet–someone, somewhere is offering exactly what they want.
Quote: … certain distribution/retail players can win by catering to the long tail itself (Amazon being the obvious one) … They are simply capable of capturing more attention, and everyone else is playing for scraps. The Long Tail players themselves are blockbusters at playing the Long Tail.
What’s fascinating about Google, Amazon, Netflixes, iTunes is that their business model is the clue to how customers behave in markets of infinite choice.
It’s about availability, trusted sources, filtering, searchability and discovery. Those players have the attention because they’re using technology that responds to what users want to do.
Quote: You may argue (in fact, you probably already have, and itís a good point) that various tech/media advances make it possible to capture more attention across the board than previouslyóthings like blogs and RSS feeds, search engines, and lightweight data definitely seem to allow individuals to manage far more information than ever before. But these are incremental, occasional, and relatively small in scope; in short, they are a far cry from the kind of paradigmatic change that the Long Tail phenom aspires to: that is, a wholesale changing of the rules of the game.
Tell that to media companies that are losing revenue due to craigslist, news blogs, etc.
Anderson would say you need to think about the decades of innovation that have made business what it is today. The various tech/media advances unified and amplified the problems in existing distribution channels, but they also improved things on a non-internet, physical world level. Online purchases involve, in the case of Amazon book purchases: FedEx, ISBN numbers, standard bibliographic data, credit cards, databases, tracking codes–big improvements to business and distribution channels. But the massive change is our tendency to turn to the internet for information. The expectation is 1) if it is available, it is online, and 2) if you want me to buy it, you’ll help me find it.
You’re right that there’s a scarity of attention on an individual level, but the tech/media changes that are successful are the ones that help us filter info, find what we’re looking for and discover something new.
There are lots of arguments one can make about The Long Tail, but I do think it’s a book worth reading. In some ways there’s nothing new, but that’s why we should be paying attention. Anderson isn’t speculating on the future and what consumers will do in the future, he’s telling us what they are doing today, and all the ways that businesses can improve.
