Long Tail Marketing – Don’t be too ashamed if you have no idea what that is

When it comes to marketing, there seems to be a concept, strategy or methodology for every color of the rainbow. Some pan out, some don’t. So it isn’t too surprising if you have heard of the phrase, “Long Tail” by now without having anyone telling you what that means.

The easiest explaination is to say that a “long tail” is the collection of all of those things that have a low number of interested people or customers – and of those, there are a lot. They make a long tail, as opposed to the collection of all those things that a LOT of people are interested in. While a lot of people are interested in them, there aren’t too many things which are that popular. On a graph, which is an even easier way to explain things, that looks like this:

Long Tail Graph – courtesy of Wikipedia“/>

All of those really popular things are in the “red” section, and all of those less popular things are in yellow. If the area of the yellow is greater than the area of the red, then there is more to be gained by chasing all of those less-popular terms then there is chasing the ones that are highly popular.

Think of a food shop at the mall that only sells corndogs. Corndogs are a pretty specialized fast food choice, and they are constantly getting killed in the food court by their neighbor, which sells pretzels, snicker doodles, baklava and pie. If all of these products have the same low number of potentially interested customers, the corndog shop will always get a quarter the business of the shop that also sells less sought after food but with more types of it.

The pizza shop across from these two doesn’t do as well as The House of Peculiar Mall Food, even though they sell the most common type of food.

Long tail is another term for “niche.” And niche is one thing that kept a lot of businesses running after the internet bubble burst six years ago. That is because chasing the short tail costs a lot of money. (The pizza shop enjoys higher popularity, but it means they also have to compete with all those other pizza shops.) When the investment bankers wanted their money back in 2000, the businesses that needed capital to compete in highly competitive markets were buried. Niche markets survived, however, because of the lack of direct competition and the regular cash flow from the few – but dedicated – customers for their strange wares.

written at November 30th, 2006 and is filed under Traditional Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.