The Profit Of The Path Less Traveled
Written by Evan SchumanNovember 4th, 2010
Last month, a vendor was hawking one of those mall kiosk clothing-measuring systems that uses millimeter radio waves to take hundreds of thousands of measurements to deliver the perfect clothing fit. A company representative started pushing a columnist from a major Philadelphia newspaper to try the machine and write about it. As you can guess, this test didn't go well.
The columnist took the vendor up on its offer and tried the machine, working with company owners. At the end of the process, the machine is supposed to cough up a list of jeans that will fit that consumer perfectly and where to get them. In this case, though, the machine found zero. Zilch. But this is not merely a case of a vendor proudly doing a demo before the technology is ready. It's the latest example of a vendor focusing on the majority of consumers, when the gold actually lies in the minority.
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Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk.com? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
-Christine
November 4th, 2010 at 9:01 am
Agreed that “chasing the long tail” [of the graph-no pun intended] leads to profits. It’s like developing internet applications, where opportunity lies in the long tail where customization, exception, personalization and relevance all are optimized to the user.