My weekly newspaper column: Chasing the Tail

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MODS: This is my column; I have reprint permissions from The Sentinel

also available online at:
http://www.cumberlink.com/articles/2006/07/13/editorial/rich_lewis/lewis01.txt

comments appreciated


We’re more diverse, more isolated
By Rich Lewis, July 13, 2006

Back in the 1960s, when many kids from the cities and suburbs grabbed their backpacks and headed to the countryside in search of a more "meaningful" life, a popular slogan among them was "Less is More."

Although attributed to architects Buckminster Fuller and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the phrase actually came from a love poem by Robert Browning written in 1855.

The Zennish admonition meant different things to different people, but the essence was that more of what you wanted — satisfaction, peace, abundance, strength — could be found in simplicity than in complexity.

The same general sentiment was expressed in the oft-heard phrase "Small is Beautiful."

Well, those concepts have made a comeback in a much-buzzed-about new book — but this time they appear as marketing strategies refracted through the lens of modern technology — ironically, two things, commercialism and machinery, from which those wide-eyed hippies were attempting to flee.

The book is called "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More" by Chris Anderson.

Anderson argues that traditional business models focused on finding the "big hits" — products that huge numbers of consumers would buy.

"The theory of the Long Tail," Anderson writes on his website (www.thelongtail.com), "is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of ‘hits’ (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail."

The "hits" approach dominated because "bricks and mortar stores" can only fit so many goods on their shelves. The owners have to sell a lot of a few products to make a profit.

But online sellers, for example, don’t face that constraint. They stock cyber-shelfspace — which can be expanded endlessly with a few keystrokes. Wal-Mart can carry a selection of books, music and movies, but onliners like Amazon, iTunes or Netflix can stock every item available in their product categories.

Coupled with falling costs of production and distribution, sellers generally face "less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers." Instead, narrowly targeted goods and services "can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare."

"Hits" are still possible (such as Anderson’s own book), and can make you a fortune, but real opportunities now lie in products that appeal to small groups of people. You can make just as much money selling a thousand copies of a thousand different books as you can selling a million copies of one book. The products are out there ("the number of available niche products outnumbers the hits by several orders of magnitude"); the buyers are out there; the Internet and similar technologies make it cost-efficient to reach them.

Just this week, for example, I bought a CD at Amazon by the group Tilly and the Wall because it wasn’t on the shelf at the local music store. It won’t sell a million copies; you’ve probably never heard of Tilly. But Amazon doesn’t care — it has thousands of niche CDs just like it, all seeking just a nibble of the market.

The idea of selling fewer of more items, that small markets can mean beautiful profits, is interesting to businesspeople, but others, including me, are more intrigued by the social consequences of The Long Tail and its possible wider applications.

Anderson’s observation that "mass culture" is eroding into a "mass of niches" is not new. Many others have noted that we have fewer common points of reference. At one time, you could ask anybody what they thought about last night’s episode of "I Love Lucy" or get the whole office to sing "She Loves You." TV, radio and retailers focused on a few "hits" and everyone knew them.

But now? Go ahead — try to get just half the people at work to sing together a song released in the last year.

Is this good or bad?

It doesn’t feel good because cultural unity has value — though if you go too far, you get the Taliban. And that’s bad.

It makes my work as a teacher much harder — because I have fewer common points of reference with my students, and they have fewer with each other. But the sharing of niche interests gives us all a broader view of the world.

So it’s a mixed bag.

I saw Anderson’s point echoed in another realm when I read a recent George Will column in Newsweek. Will points out that Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political strategist, doesn’t concentrate exclusively on mass blocks of voters, but targets "slivers of the electorate" that are "to be courted with niche marketing."

Instead of seeing millions of Jewish voters across the country, for example, and trying to capture all their votes with one pitch, Rove might see a few thousand Jews in Cleveland who happen to share an isolated political trait — and target them. Like Tilly in the Wall CDs, all those small blocs can add up to a lot of votes. And you win them not by lumping people into two huge categories, red or blue — but by carefully sorting out the many shades of purple.

Anderson’s book is already getting widespread attention. His theory might prove right or wrong.

But it’s interesting to consider the possibility that in the end, the tail will, indeed, wag the dog.

Rich Lewis' e-mail address is [e-mail]