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The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (精装)
by Chris Anderson
| Category:
Marketing, Innovation, Change management, Business |
| Market price: ¥ 258.00
MSL price:
¥ 218.00
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Interesting and insightful book with fascinating competitive implications for your business in the new-economy context. |
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 10 items |
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Houston Chronicle (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson offers a visionary look at the future of business and common culture. The long-tail phenomenon, he argues, will "re-shape our understanding of what people actually want to watch" (or read, etc.). While Anderson presents a fascinating idea backed by thoughtful (if repetitive) analysis, many critics questioned just how greatly the niche market will rework our common popular culture. Anderson convinced most reviewers in his discussion of Internet media sales, but his KitchenAid and Lego examples fell flat. A few pointed out that online markets constitute just 10 percent of U.S. retail, and brick-and-mortar stores will never disappear. Anderson's thesis came under a separate attack by Lee Gomes in his Wall Street Journal column. Anderson had defined the "98 Percent Rule" in his book to mean that no matter how much inventory is made available online, 98 percent of the items will sell at least once. Yet Gomes cited statistics that could indicate that, as the Web and Web services become more mainstream, the 98 Percent Rule may no longer apply: "Ecast [a music-streaming company] told me that now, with a much bigger inventory than when Mr. Anderson spoke to them two years ago, the quarterly no-play rate has risen from 2% to 12%. March data for the 1.1 million songs of Rhapsody, another streamer, shows a 22% no-play rate; another 19% got just one or two plays." If Anderson overreaches in his thesis, he has nonetheless written "one of those business books that, ironically, deserves more than a niche readership" |
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Shawn Sullivan (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
Chris Anderson has written a thought-provoking book in The Long Tail. It's about the new economics of culture and commerce. While I enjoyed thinking about the main premise - that the Internet has dramatically changed the interplay between supply and demand - I once again concluded that the book could have been a lot shorter (possibly a result of my taking the book Blink to heart).
The title refers to the shape of a classic downward-sloping demand curve if you graphed popularity (x-axis) vs. demand (y-axis). Think about book industry where the demand for a few titles (bestsellers or even top 100) is very high, but demand for the 200,000th most popular book is sporadic at best. Consequently, Barnes & Noble stores can only carry books with a certain level of demand and will miss a lot of the niche topics that are out there.
But, because of the Internet, the demand captured in the 'long tail' of this curve, comprised of thousands of niche businesses, represents a vibrant business. For example, while the typical Barnes & Noble will carry 100,000 titles, Amazon offers 3.7 million and says that 25% of their sales come from books outside of the top 100,000 titles. They claim, and the premise of the book is, that as companies offer increased supply (because in the new Internet economy, they can), demand seems to follow supply and, in fact, increases.
Another related trend is the transition across business lines from 'hit' to 'niche', which is exemplified by the popularity of myspace.com, eBay, iTunes and Google (representing the long tail of advertising).
The six main themes of the book are:
1. In virtually all markets, there are far more niche goods than hits, as a result of improvements in the basic tools of production (i.e. Internet).
2. The costs of reaching these niches is now falling dramatically thanks to digital distribution, search and a critical mass of broadband technology.
3. There are a range of tools - from recommendations to rankings (think search) that help to shift demand down the long tail, and help people find useful/relevant niches.
4. The effect of all of this is that the demand curve will eventually flatten, with the hits becoming relatively less popular and the niches growing in popularity.
5. All of the niches add up to comprise a market that rivals the hits.
6. The internet can reveal a natural shape of demand, undistorted by distribution bottlenecks, scarcity of information and limited choice of shelf space.
I would recommend this book to all those interested in a well thought out premise on how the internet has radically altered many business models due to various supply and demand characteristics and the ability to exploit demand that would previously not have been profitable. |
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Craig Matteson (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
While some try to dismiss the message of this book as merely an article about a statistical graph, I found the ideas in the book interesting and some of them powerful. There are many books on the Internet and what it can do to open mass customization, how it impacts the economic doctrine of the allocation of scarce resources (although the concept is almost universally misunderstood in these discussions), the need to open a digital front to your customers, and so forth. This book could be lumped into this group and stuck on the shelf next to them, but I think that would be a mistake.
This book deals in specifics about what is happening with real businesses rather than with what could happen. Chris Anderson shows us how the small volume items can generate significant aggregate sales. Even the seemingly vast selection offered by the big box stores and Wal-Mart ends up being only the surface of what is actually available when one is not limited by shelf space and transportation costs.
I think the great examples the book offers are Wal-Mart and Rhapsody. Wal-Mart sells something like 20% of all music sales in America, yet it carries only 4,500 titles (Amazon.com offers 800,000 music titles). Of the 30,000 new albums released each year, Wal-Mart carries only 750 (pages 155-156). Yet 40% of Rhapsody's sales come from titles not available in retail stores. These are titles that individually only sell a few times each, but in aggregate become a huge revenue generator. In the digital world, it costs almost nothing to keep these titles in inventory, but providing them a physical presence in thousands of stores cannot be justified.
Some retailers are tapping into this effect by offering a much wider variety of products online than are available in even their largest stores. Manufacturers are also offering products online that are not available through any retailer. Anderson reminds us that when you go to your local store to buy a Kitchen Aid mixer you will likely find only three colors - white, black, and something else (he also shares why retailers choose this selection). If you go to the Kitchen Aid website you can choose among fifty colors. Similarly, Lego has a specialized set of offerings for its hobbyist force that are not available anywhere else.
The author also discusses the varying studies that seem to say contrary things about customers and choice. It turns out that customers show their preference for lots of choice over and over again. But successful offerings of choice also have to provide help for the consumer to find what he or she is looking for. It involves search, product information, even samples.
The last chapter offers nine rules for functioning in the world of the Long Tail. I think the book is quite interesting and appropriately sized for the insights it offers. There are some helpful charts and graphs, as well. The hard part is thinking through the implications of this reality for your business and for your competitive situation.
Good strategizing! |
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Mike Banks (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
What a wonderful lot of comment and argument The Long Tail is generating. Thus far I've seen the book analyzed, amplified, scrutinized, and vilified. There's argument and nay-saying, but never mind all that: the important thing is that the book has people talking. Why is this important? Because The Long Tail (both concept and book) is a tipping point.
A strong statement for a book - for this book - you say? I think not, because in The Long Tail Chris Anderson finally shows the Internet for what it is: a market in search of products. (Of course it's more than that, but in marketing terms, Internet users are consumers searching for choices.)
For twenty-five years (yes, there was an online before the Web) entrepreneurs and analysts have tried to sum up the online world from a marketing perspective, searching for some magical approach or model that would make modem users sit up and buy. They've made it a billboard; they've tried value-adding and cost-cutting and endless other practices from the brick-and-mortar world. But nothing that one could point to and say, "This is unique to Internet."
All the while the real secret of Internet marketing has been right in front of us, waiting for someone (Anderson) to recognize it: The Internet can give buyers what they truly want - something traditional retailers cannot do. This fact alone is a powerful marketing tool, but there is much more to The Long Tail than that, as its readers already know. If you're interested in the Internet as a market, you need to know what they know.
With regards to The Long Tail as a tipping point… this book is going to inspire more than a few new businesses as readers work on ways to implement its concepts. Businesses already doing what The Long Tail describes will grow. Some businesses will modify themselves to better serve niche markets. And the aggregators will move in. At this very moment The Long Tail sits atop a stack of business books on the desk of a certain marketing executive at one of the world's largest corporations, and the owner of that desk is already considering how best to follow the long tail to profit. Can you get there first? Read The Long Tail and see. |
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Kathleen Connolly (USA quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
In my ongoing attempt to reach for the brave new opportunities of Internet business, I recently read The Long Tail (Hyperion, 2006) by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine. The book provides all the logic you might ever need for understanding why, as the subtitle says, "the future of business is selling more of less." As the Internet enables a shift "from mass culture to massively parallel culture," Anderson says that micro markets are strengthening while mass markets are weakening.
The book consolidated three perspectives for me:
1. Big hits will continue to exist but will draw fewer loyal customers. Blockbuster products will continue to exist, but the definition of a blockbuster is changing. Anderson offers some data-rich case studies to make his point.
2. Contrary to the wisdom once prevalent in business schools, it is no longer imperative to create blockbusters in order to create sustainable profitability.
3. The old nostrum about 80% of profits deriving from 20% of products is widely misunderstood and not well supported by the current business environment. When costs of inventory and distribution are low, as they often are in Internet-facilitated transactions, there is less reason to concentrate on 20% of products.
The title derives from the traditional depiction of the statistical bell curve, in which the high curve in the middle represents the greatest volume of the phenomenon being measured and the flat ends represent the low-volume "tails." Those tails, says Anderson, are lengthening infinitely as the Internet delivers unprecedented variety to mass audiences. The height of the curve is simultaneously flattening.
Though Anderson doesn't go into it deeply, the "long tail" phenomenon clearly has big implications for the future of labor and management. Many emerging niches, Anderson points out, are being created by self-organizing, voluntary peer production networks. For examples, think of open source software collaborators, Indian movie makers, self- published book authors, blog operators, and self-appointed scientists. (An excellent book on this phenomenon is Eric S. Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, published by O'Reilly Media in 2001.)
Indeed, because of volunteer, self-organizing labor, says Anderson, everything will soon make it to market. (Everything?) One of the major opportunities in this scenario will be for aggregators who help buyers make sense of it all.
Anderson has a compelling, readable style, though a few of the economics discussions are a little jargon-happy. In other reviews, some have commented that The Long Tail leads the reader to the precipice of new insight, but leaves you without a method for taking a confident leap into this new world. Anderson does not claim to offer this kind of how-to advice, but the absence of it is a bit frustrating. Overall, though, The Long Tail leaves you better equipped to think about where it is all going - business, career and management - and where you fit within it. |
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Aaron Dykstra (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson is a book that explores how people shop and purchase and compares it to how they did this over the last 40 years to come up with a new theory of niches and individual tastes. Chris shows how the age of mega blockbuster is coming to a close. As part of that statement he shows that the numbers as a whole are going up as general consumption is going up, but as a percentage of the population and of the purchases dollars spent, it is steadily decreasing. Mr. Anderson utilizes Rhapsody, iTunes, and Amazon.com are leading the way in offering huge selections to feed our very individualistic tastes. We no longer have to be satisfied by the stock of the local record store, or by what the small B. Dalton located in the mall to drive what we could buy. If I have a taste for Industrial Alternative Carnival music, then now I can truly buy music that fits that genre.
The problem that Chris points at though is how can consumers find these items. How can I find the Surf Green KitchenAid StandMixer? (Did you know there are 24 colors of KitchenAid StandMixers?) How do I find new music to fit my taste or a new author or work that fits my need to read? It was possible for the old time record store clerk to handle their catalog, but can any one person handle 300,000+ albums in their head and Amazon carries many, many more than that...
I enjoyed the book as a sort of mental exercise where I utilized his problem space (even though I sit in it at work) and tried to think of ways to surface those things that are not commonly shown since they aren't mainstream. The problem is really surfacing those to the right people. I recommend this book as a look at marketing to niches and the smaller, avid consumers within. |
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Patrick McDonald (MSL quote) , USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
I was excited when I first got this book. As I began to read it though I discovered many problems with the conclusions Anderson was making. For example, he made Google out to be an ingenious search engine, capable of retrieving exactly what people want using "Wisdom of the Crowd". And in most cases this "Wisdom" was given out of a sense of purpose and not for profit. Reality could not be further from the truth. I find Google to be increasingly less useful. Made-For-Adsense websites dominate the top search results of everything which contain nothing more than link farms, useless link directories, and of course Google advertisements made to make Google and the Adsense partner rich at the expense of small business owners on the Long Tail. In fact there was so much indirect praise for Google I began to wonder if Anderson was somehow making a commission through Adsense.
Then there's Wikipedia. The body of knowledge where whoever is the most persistent wins, including high school and college students with nothing better else to do. Hardly a crowd wisdom I'm interested in. Anderson seems to believe crowds are smarter than individuals. While crowds might be better at predicting crowd behavior they certainly don't solve any significant problems.
The references to and quotes from Karl Marx were never ending.
I could keep going but I won't. If you generally lean towards classical economics or you think America is better off not being a true democracy because you don't want the "crowd wisdom" ruining what's good, then you probably won't like the book. You probably won't even finish reading it. I couldn't.
(A negative review. MSL remarks.)
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James Taylor (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
Chris Anderson does a nice job of introducing some key concepts that are redefining business in the Internet era. As he says "The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes". In this world the ability of the Internet to give customers access to a vast (and rapidly growing) array of choices is changing not just how they buy but what they buy. The book has some solid research on how companies, both pure Internet retailers and mixed offline/online retailers are adapting to this world. The book discusses everything from Sturgeon's Law ("ninety percent of everything is crud") to the "98 percent rule" (98% of anything sold online will have at least occasional sales even if the online catalog is 40 times the offline one). The book covers how hits have dominated in the past century and how niches will dominate in this one. It also gives some general suggestions as to what you can do about it although it does somewhat leave you hanging in terms of specific advice for how to do marketing, build information systems etc in this brave new world. Thought provoking and compelling. |
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Ilya (MSL quote), Canada
<2006-12-31 00:00>
Long Tail is about the economics of abundance, a relatively new phenomenon in our society. While the power law distribution (80-20 rule, Pareto distribution) is not new, the context of it in our society is; Chris Anderson does an exceptional job of articulating the impact of the Long Tail economics on our everyday life.
As argued by the author, the PC democratized the tools of production be giving everyone cheap access to an unlimited toolbox. The Internet, in turn, democratized the means of distribution by giving the user (manufacturer) the ability to also be a world-wide distributor. Thus, we entered the era of information abundance; the Internet exploded and the information highways are packed as never before. And this is where the third force comes in, filters! Filters are the tools we use to cut through the noise (read abundance) and find what is relevant to us. This is the reason for the success of Google, Ebay, Amazon, Netflix, Rhapsody... the list goes on.
The differences between our culture 20 years ago, which utilized pre-filters (executives, designers, engineers, etc.) to define taste, and post-filters (bloggers, aggregators, recommendations, etc.) today have vastly changed the landscape of business and consumer behavior. It may not be an 'industrial revolution', but it is changing the landscape of our society. Bloggers, 'virtual water cooler communities' and social bookmarking sites are all part of this undeniable trend.
This is a book for everyone - entrepreneurs, marketing specialists, psychologists... and engineers. Chris Anderson provides a great overview of where were heading; all of the sudden all the latest trends seem to fit! |
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Jerry Saperstein (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-31 00:00>
The big thing these days seems to be science writers like Malcolm Gladwell coming up with best-sellers that, charitably put, are very light on facts and very long on sometimes outlandish assertion. Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, joins the parade with his silly - yes, silly - claim that businesses like music and movies are no longer driven by hits, but by the "long tail." That it is the thousands of titles that people buy or rent infrequently. Somehow, according to Anderson, the idea of web merchants making a zillion titles available and some of those titles being sold or rented once or twice will be the "transformation… coming to just about every industry imaginable." Uh, no it ain't. Nowhere in the book does Anderson factor in the reality that someone pays for the production of all those videos and music tracks that rent or sell infrequently. Nor does he account for the reality that not every web merchant can achieve the volume of an Amazon or eBay. In other words, Anderson has discovered the obvious: if you make 30,000 movies available for rental, let's say, through a Netflix, many of the cult titles and dogs will be rented. Anderson pounds on this "long tail" effect while glossing over the fact that the neighborhood video rental store won't carry 30,000 titles. The profits from the occasional rental of the 30,000th item on the list won't match the cost of acquiring and keeping it in stock in a store, while it makes little difference to a Netflix.
Anderson also plays fast and loose with his facts. In fact, Anderson sometimes simply omits facts that might undermine his argument. Lee Gomes, of The Wall St. Journal, did some homework and discovered that "By Mr. Anderson's calculation, 25% of Amazon's sales are from its tail, as they involve books you can't find at a traditional retailer. But using another analysis of those numbers - an analysis that Mr. Anderson argues isn't meaningful - you can show that 2.7% of Amazon's titles produce a whopping 75% of its revenues. Not quite as impressive." Thus the traditional retail store's emphasis on big movers is smart merchandising.
Overall, this is just another over-hyped pseudo-science book that takes a very narrow view based on few facts, ignores any embarrassing discrepancies and proclaims itself as an earth-shattering discovery. For those who are aware of how statistical data can be manipulated, this is indeed a very humorous book. For marketers, however, it is an essentially useless tome. Anderson's enthusiastic, breezy style, even though it is ultimately ill-informed and almost dishonest, does make for interesting reading. Just don't take what's here too seriously. |
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