The Long Tail for Heavy Business?

I was with Paul [whose digital footprint is miniscule, he’s practically invisible. Get about more man!] the other night and we were trying to work through what ‘marketing as conversation’ meant to marketers. It’s tricky. The implications seem to be that the Long Tail  marks the end of traditional marketing for many companies in the 'digital eocnomy' and therefore puts formal marketers out of work as 'advocates', 'evangelists' and filters for niche products become the marketers of the future. 

But as much as I’m a fully bought in club-class member of the Long Tail appreciation society, I often struggle to see how this sea change in the structure of the economy applies to some of the businesses I deal with day-in day-out. 

Let’s start with Builders Merchants [I’ve got lots of other examples which I may use in later posts, depending on the response from this one]. Nothing glamorous about Builders Merchants. They facilitate direct sales of things like drainage for developers as well as maintaining stocks on the ground to cover for missing, broken, stolen or smaller items. And sure, product ranges across a whole tract of different types of 'heavy' products [drainage, cement - 'heavy' building products] have broadened out and information about who is selling what is more open and transparent which works to suppress margins as merchants compete aginst each other to get the trade [though most information / dealing is done over the phone rather than online –  virtual merchants stores are a rarity for 'heavy goods'].

The internet is allowing near perfect information but the nature of the industry means that the stock by it's nature is bricks and mortar and consequently stock management is quite constrained.  Physical geography and the pricing and competitive structure means that economies of scale tend to reduce the number of suppliers - the economics of the Head are really tough and there are few benefits in the Long Tail to offer any profit hope . The Long Tail is very short. And actually, where you might expect merchants to build up relationships with their customers and develop these customers into the overall offering builders don’t ‘do’ chit chat, and specifiers don’t do much small talk either even less online, so price becomes the predominant factor pushing toward a concentration of suppliers.

So what is the learning? Can the Long Tail help us here? Are older, traditional businesses just further down the line toward a ‘marketing as conversation’ solution to a Long Tail issue… or does a different business model apply with it’s own concomitant marketing solution? It would seem to me that it's the latter but I kind of talked myself into a situation with Paul wherby I hinted at the former and now I need to work out if that's really the case :-/

Disclaimer: anything expressed in this blog is my own personal opinion and not necessarily that of my employer. Any dumb ass stuff is mine and mine alone.

Comments

[Chris Anderson]

Excellent questions. I haven't been doing much on the LT outside of media and entertainment on the blog (by agreement with my publisher) but will have a chapter on it in the book. Basically, in any industry where you can have centralized storage (warehouses, direct from factory, etc) or distributed fufillment (eBay, etc) you can extend the LT into heavy goods. There's also the case of customized versions, mfg'd on demand (Dell model), which is another way of getting at niches in physical goods while avoiding shelf space issues.