samedi 15 décembre 2007
mercredi 12 décembre 2007
Long Tail
Long Tail, definition by Chris Anderson
The theory of the Long Tail 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. 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-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio.
See a number of links in previous massages
Web retailing
Everybody knows the economic effects of web retailing: economy on stocks, personnel, great option to monitor all sorts of marketing information, quickly adapt offers to demands; that makes it a little bit similar to industrial “just-in-time” techniques - to minimize the expenses of all points of a distribution chain. Customers have immediate access to the whole shop database; they can find much more items with several clicks than while spending hours between bookstore shells.
The immediate great advantage of web retailng is interactiveness. The process of buying and selling becomes an exchage platform as for customers, as well for suppliers and aggregators: exchange of the opinions, products or affiliates services.
Practical view
After the theory come real practice and real commercial interests. Quick web search and my own experience make the proofs of the following speculations.
We are coming from two poles:
1. Companies that exist physically and develop their selling through internet (quick access, huge amounts, facilitated sales), for exemple, most of transport and flying companies.
2. Companies created on the base of e-platforms (amazon, ebay etc)
The most visible problems (that apparently on the way of being quickly solved) are purely IT. Sometimes it dowsizes to zero a practical realization of an excellent idea; that concerns not only small businesses but big companies as well, like Lufthansa or KLM (in air tickets distribution on-line); imperfect product catalogues, difficult interface pushes off a large group of potential on line buyers.
The other pole is more concerned by lack of physical references of quality of selected items. Who and according which criteria makes the recommendations, that creates a real commercial deal? Who makes the conclusion about customer behavior? How a customer profile is treated? It is really difficult to be neutral in recommendations, and from the other side to trust them, even after creation of blog systems, comments on quality (for example, choice of a hotel on line ), a customer could never know if it was an real customers’ opinion, rating, or pre-paid advertising. That concerns a lot of tourist sales, even if they affirm only the aggregating services, one can easily discover after that the curve of ‘cheapest product’ at the end is not so cheapest and does not correspond to references of “independent users” at all. Links are deliberately omitted.
Some examples of virtual libraries
Experiment: I tried to find books of any Russian writers within not more than 10 minutes per catalogue.
A good example of library aggregation: FNAC. (www.fnac.com)
Here we see the selection according to the literature prices; great! The choice is not made by the company itself, prices renommés are high. The FNAC is once more trustable as known for external literature activities (clubs, discussions, etc), so we have real physical references of quality and choice.
Other example – www.ebooks.com
A huge catalogue, but always a selection proposed in front lines: selection appears and we do not know by which criteria they were shown (publicity, rating?). But we do know that people see them and nearly nobody goes out of screen down the page. So, the first 3-4 items are surely were noticed….
No doubt that internet retailing is really profitable and much more easily accessible tand structured than the physical one but we still do not know how neutral the commercial management is….
www.amazon.com -friendly catalogue, but books are still presented by rating (more and see, more you buy, more the several first page books are sold). The profile of buyer is immediatedly caught up and a lot of suggestion around, similar to my previous choices. But I did not want it any more!
By the way, www.google.com openly suggests books promotion in Google’s search engine to increase sales. Detailed description:
http://books.google.com/intl/fr/googlebooks/book_search_tour/index.html
Another site: www.chapitre.com : a lot of suggestions, promotions, but impossible to find what I wanted.
One more: www.aligastore.com : promising idea to find any book wright near by your place. Russian literature is very hard to find if you can not indicate the name of the book of author (with Russian – latin spelling it is not so evident, books are not available on network (that ‘s a pity, it is on Fnac, near my place!)).
Ouf!
To sum up all the comments above I would say that theoretical idea of Long Tail is very exiting, but the present reality unfortunately shows us that consumers are still strongly driven.
Solutions:
1. To keep the business sustainable the most important thing is to be trusted. Despite of seducing idea of promotion try to keep the neutralisme towards catalogued items.
2. Create and keep up an efficient internal search engine, preferably with a quick access and detailed description of products.
3. Make guiding or give a piece of advice, if possible, according to independent or external known experts.
4. Organize a special area for promotion, not in catalogue (some of us need it).
5. Work hardly on IT basis and friendly interface (how easy to say, how tough to be performed!)
6. Organize associated services around to insrease the neutral additional revenues, as for example, commission and to develop a trustable company image (for books that could be club member activities, literature evenings, second hand book exchange, logistic chain, on line discussions etc )
7. Make loyalty partner programs; for books that could be museums, cinemas, other entertainment units
8. Assure good logistics and delivery, it can be well outsourced.
9. Love and respect your customer, it is the main business secret!
The theory of the Long Tail 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. 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-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
One example of this is the theory's prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio.
See a number of links in previous massages
Web retailing
Everybody knows the economic effects of web retailing: economy on stocks, personnel, great option to monitor all sorts of marketing information, quickly adapt offers to demands; that makes it a little bit similar to industrial “just-in-time” techniques - to minimize the expenses of all points of a distribution chain. Customers have immediate access to the whole shop database; they can find much more items with several clicks than while spending hours between bookstore shells.
The immediate great advantage of web retailng is interactiveness. The process of buying and selling becomes an exchage platform as for customers, as well for suppliers and aggregators: exchange of the opinions, products or affiliates services.
Practical view
After the theory come real practice and real commercial interests. Quick web search and my own experience make the proofs of the following speculations.
We are coming from two poles:
1. Companies that exist physically and develop their selling through internet (quick access, huge amounts, facilitated sales), for exemple, most of transport and flying companies.
2. Companies created on the base of e-platforms (amazon, ebay etc)
The most visible problems (that apparently on the way of being quickly solved) are purely IT. Sometimes it dowsizes to zero a practical realization of an excellent idea; that concerns not only small businesses but big companies as well, like Lufthansa or KLM (in air tickets distribution on-line); imperfect product catalogues, difficult interface pushes off a large group of potential on line buyers.
The other pole is more concerned by lack of physical references of quality of selected items. Who and according which criteria makes the recommendations, that creates a real commercial deal? Who makes the conclusion about customer behavior? How a customer profile is treated? It is really difficult to be neutral in recommendations, and from the other side to trust them, even after creation of blog systems, comments on quality (for example, choice of a hotel on line ), a customer could never know if it was an real customers’ opinion, rating, or pre-paid advertising. That concerns a lot of tourist sales, even if they affirm only the aggregating services, one can easily discover after that the curve of ‘cheapest product’ at the end is not so cheapest and does not correspond to references of “independent users” at all. Links are deliberately omitted.
Some examples of virtual libraries
Experiment: I tried to find books of any Russian writers within not more than 10 minutes per catalogue.
A good example of library aggregation: FNAC. (www.fnac.com)
Here we see the selection according to the literature prices; great! The choice is not made by the company itself, prices renommés are high. The FNAC is once more trustable as known for external literature activities (clubs, discussions, etc), so we have real physical references of quality and choice.
Other example – www.ebooks.com
A huge catalogue, but always a selection proposed in front lines: selection appears and we do not know by which criteria they were shown (publicity, rating?). But we do know that people see them and nearly nobody goes out of screen down the page. So, the first 3-4 items are surely were noticed….
No doubt that internet retailing is really profitable and much more easily accessible tand structured than the physical one but we still do not know how neutral the commercial management is….
www.amazon.com -friendly catalogue, but books are still presented by rating (more and see, more you buy, more the several first page books are sold). The profile of buyer is immediatedly caught up and a lot of suggestion around, similar to my previous choices. But I did not want it any more!
By the way, www.google.com openly suggests books promotion in Google’s search engine to increase sales. Detailed description:
http://books.google.com/intl/fr/googlebooks/book_search_tour/index.html
Another site: www.chapitre.com : a lot of suggestions, promotions, but impossible to find what I wanted.
One more: www.aligastore.com : promising idea to find any book wright near by your place. Russian literature is very hard to find if you can not indicate the name of the book of author (with Russian – latin spelling it is not so evident, books are not available on network (that ‘s a pity, it is on Fnac, near my place!)).
Ouf!
To sum up all the comments above I would say that theoretical idea of Long Tail is very exiting, but the present reality unfortunately shows us that consumers are still strongly driven.
Solutions:
1. To keep the business sustainable the most important thing is to be trusted. Despite of seducing idea of promotion try to keep the neutralisme towards catalogued items.
2. Create and keep up an efficient internal search engine, preferably with a quick access and detailed description of products.
3. Make guiding or give a piece of advice, if possible, according to independent or external known experts.
4. Organize a special area for promotion, not in catalogue (some of us need it).
5. Work hardly on IT basis and friendly interface (how easy to say, how tough to be performed!)
6. Organize associated services around to insrease the neutral additional revenues, as for example, commission and to develop a trustable company image (for books that could be club member activities, literature evenings, second hand book exchange, logistic chain, on line discussions etc )
7. Make loyalty partner programs; for books that could be museums, cinemas, other entertainment units
8. Assure good logistics and delivery, it can be well outsourced.
9. Love and respect your customer, it is the main business secret!
lundi 10 décembre 2007
More links for Long Tail
Practical model for analysing long tail:
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_5/kilkki/index.html
http://www.seo-blog.com/long-tail-search.php
http://www.distinctseo.com/blog/seo/ppc-marketing-and-long-tail-analysis-rebuttal/
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_5/kilkki/index.html
http://www.seo-blog.com/long-tail-search.php
http://www.distinctseo.com/blog/seo/ppc-marketing-and-long-tail-analysis-rebuttal/
Useful links to discover what Long Tail is:
http://www.journaldunet.com/diaporama/0610-dicoweb2/9.shtml
http://www.journaldunet.com/0703/070326-net-long-tail-definition-solution-outils-longue-traine.shtml
http://longtail.typepad.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail
To my mind the most comprehensive explanation from the author, Chris Anderson:
http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html
http://www.journaldunet.com/diaporama/0610-dicoweb2/9.shtml
http://www.journaldunet.com/0703/070326-net-long-tail-definition-solution-outils-longue-traine.shtml
http://longtail.typepad.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail
To my mind the most comprehensive explanation from the author, Chris Anderson:
http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html
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