Social Marketing Strategies from Social Marketing Expert Peter Lenkefi

A lot of our clients come back to us often asking : What IS The Long Tail?

“The Long Tail” is a not-self-explanatory phrase coined in 2004 by Wired Magazine’s, editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson which has won a National Magazine Award under his tenure), typifying the seemingly unstoppable trend of rapid abundance in niche markets made possible by technological advance.

Anderson in fact has a blog devoted to the long tail, stuffed with a lot of analysis of this phenomenon.

His postings aren’t always easy to follow, and it takes a while to get to the actual definition of the long tail.

An important prelude:

“As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers.

In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.”

Against that, Anderson spells out the “long tail.”

The term refers specifically to the yellow part of his sales chart which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods.

The red part of his curve is the hits, which have dominated markets and culture for most of the last century. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.

In essence, what Anderson is saying is that the collective value of the rapidly growing niche sources of content, which constitute the yellow tail in the chart, could outweigh the worth of the giant, hit-driven traditional sources of entertainment, news and other forms of content.