We've been living with a vision of transactional magic that was too good to ignore, and has turned out to be too good to be true.
The idea of a "Long Tail" has permeated business reporting and venture capitalist funding plans ever since Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson tagged it a few years ago.
It's a simple conceit, which makes it elegantly memorable, with just a bit of voodoo thrown in to make it sexy; in a sentence, it suggests that low sales/awareness at the general front end of the demand curve can yield lots of niche transactions at the back end made possible by the ubiquitous, ever-present, everywhere Internet.
What made it even more thrilling as a theory was that it flew in the face of a few hundred years' worth of collected wisdom on the importance on individual contemplation and group affirmation to commercial decision-making. A quote by a learned "expert" in some obscure area on the web could reach a thousand fellow Obscurians and prompt sales. One of the progeny of the concept is a service called Net Promoter, which scores and assigns value to this talking-about mechanism.
Only the latest number-crunching research can't recommend the theory.
A Harvard Business School prof. named Anita Elberse has discovered two primary realities of consumption:
- First, individuals don't like infinite choice. It's not empowering, and it's not what we're looking for when we're looking for information or products/services
- Second, group affirmation is an important component to making purchase decisions. People are less the rugged individualists pioneering their own online realities, and more simply physical schlubs looking for order, reason, and safety
We're building a New World of Communication on behaviors that are distinctly old, not terribly worldly, and lots more dependent on authoritative communication than a grand leveling of it into two-way, relativistic blather.
We are less followers of tails, and more members of packs. Big opening weekends for movies and music releases still matter most. Community endorsement, not just mention or exposure, matters, too.
I hate to seem like I'm happy to debunk the idea of a flattened demand curve; I'm not, and I think there's lots that technology does to change the ways people actualize not just their transactional desires, but their very images of experience and self. There's substance to the idea of a Long Tail.
But it's quite possible that there are no such things as "new rules." For anything.
Imagine if some newly-minted physicists announced that gravity is no longer valid, or an author other than James Joyce decided that grammar really doesn't require distinctions between nouns and verbs.
Tech headlines for the past few years, especially in the communication space, have verged on restating some version of "hey everybody, up is the new down," usually by design. Even when we've suspected that they're not as distinctly or exclusively true as they claim to be, most of us have generally gone along, because there's money to be made on the ride.
It's no surprise that the truth lies somewhere between the tail and the pack. Rules get revised, changed, adapted, applied, strained, etc. But I wonder if they ever truly disappear, to be replaced by truly new ones.
It's been just so damn exciting to see all this gee-wiz technology, and the Long Tail did hint at the promise of delivering multitudes of customers who'd somehow self-identify themselves in the vague cloud of the cybervoid. I loved that idea!
But I wonder how many other 'rules' we're busy ignoring in the branding and marketing world?
Let's see how this question plays out in the Tail, eh?
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