In an article published on WIRED by Chris Anderson, he discusses a pool of potential waiting to be tapped by businesses referred to as the “long tail.” The long tail is essentially all of these products that are on the fringe of what is popular with the masses. In order to successfully utilize the long tail, your business takes advantage of all the data available about its customers. Consumers come to your site looking for the the book that everyone has been talking about, and based on their browsing history your site can guide them to similar titles that may not be quite as popular as what they had originally been shopping for. In the article, Anderson describes how retailers like Amazon opened up the availability to the fringe products to their consumers and the sales of those books that are not their top sellers account for more than half of their book sales. When a book seller is restricted to a store with a certain amount of physical shelf space it makes sense to limit the options for consumers to the titles that are best sellers. But when the internet makes it possible to endlessly shelve titles for consumers to peruse, the sales can obviously have a significant increase.
I thought it was an important distinction to make between a success story like Amazon and other companies that have tried only operating with the long tail spectrum of products and those that strictly stick with the popular products. Without the draw of the popular products, its hard to sell only long tail items. Why or how would a consumer even find you? On the other end, if you only sell best-sellers, you’re missing out on a wealth of opportunity.
In another article discussing the long tail found in The Economist, they too discussed the benefits of the long tail. This was focused primarily on the positives consumers will experience as more businesses employ this new business model. Both articles come to the same conclusion: the long tail is connecting people with products that they likely would not have had access to before. Shopping in this sense then becomes more about the individual. Sure, they lure you in with the trends but ultimately shoppers will flourish in the products that appeal to their individual tastes. There’s something so democratic about a business model that plays to individual tastes in this matter and it really resonates with me that it promotes this idea for people to choose products so much more specifically to their taste.
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