Much has been said about the concept of The Long Tail, which was widely popularized by technologist Chris Anderson in his best seller "The Long Tail: why the future of business is selling less of more". The term and its concepts quickly made everyone's mouth, from academics to marketing gurus.However, there are many wrong ideas and interpretations of the concept put forward by Anderson some years ago:
A) While the idea of "The Long Tail" is handled as an abstract concept is actually supported by statistical theory of the normal distribution. Anyone who has taken a basic course in probability and statistics knows that the theory was created many decades ago. If anything, Anderson contributed to an interpretation of it but he cannot be considered the inventor of it.
B) While the management framework used by Anderson in his book has much to do with retailing in digital markets (Amazon, Netflix) the same concepts applies to many other services from consumer products to financial services focusing on low- income niche markets that have historically been ignored by commercial banks.
C) The term refers only to that there are many digital consumer goods which do not constitute higher turnover per se, but if we accumulate all of these unavailable goods, thus we can create a world of customers who do not have ease of getting these products (think of a b-side of a CD of your favorite artist or that lost Muppet´s film video from 1987) so long creates a whole market for these "lost" or "hidden" goods.
This is contrary to what many people think in the sense that "The Long Tail" refers to products sold in mass or that have a large base of demand from its customers. In any case, they are talking about a traditional business model: quite the opposite of the Long Tail.
D) Although the theory has been proven historically successful in many cases and technology companies within the retail industry, it still has its detractors especially in the academic world in business schools around the world.
In the coming years will have a clearer picture of the influence of this statistical and business models on their viability in the application of other business areas which are invariably not digital.
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