Katrina Deane

Katrina Deane 2/26/13 Consumer Culture Essay The Long Tail With the creation of the internet, retail items can reach a much broader audience. This allows a portal for businesses selling relatively small amounts of unique items. The strategy to do this is known as the long tail. A long tail is a statistical term for a distribution with a large number of occurrences far from the central part of the curve. Specifically, it is a type of heavy-tailed distribution. In the retail business, it is focused on selling items that are not huge hits but that have a small and/or specific consumer base. It has exploded even further recently, utilizing social networking, viral marketing, user-driven innovation, and online business. The main example I want to discuss is a website called This is Why I’m Broke (www.thisiswhyimbroke.com). This site offers a number of unique items from geek fan gear, like a mini bat-signal light, to gadgets, like a remote controlled drink float, to kid’s accessories, like a space astronaut bed set with a glow in the dark moon pillow. The prices range from a 7 dollar set of colored flame candles to a 55,000 dollar octopus chair and beyond. There is not a huge market for these items but this site allows them to reach anyone who should wish to splurge on unique retail. The items for sale are uploaded here but to buy them you must go to the parent site that created them. This is user-driven innovation at its finest, allowing individuals to post their craft to sites like etsy.com and then upload them to thisiswhyimbroke.com in order to reach a consumer base that’s looking for something exciting. Etsy itself is also a website fitting the long tail description. It focuses mainly on crafts created by individuals to sell to a small market. A more specific target market than that is served by Thinkgeek (thinkgeek.com), who deal almost entirely on fan gear from movies, shows and video games, such as Star Wars, Walking Dead, and Portal. Another type of long tail business is ModCloth (modcloth.com) which deals in vintage, and privately made clothing, sold only online. This clothing is user-driven innovation sold to a consumer base that likes this certain style. Threadless (threadless.com) is another clothing long tail business as well. It deals mostly in unique T-Shirts that are generated almost solely by submissions from users of the site. There are even competitions on the best designs. This is an interesting phenomenon, not only because it’s endlessly entertaining to look through all the crazy and unique things people have created, but because something like this can exist now where it probably couldn’t have before. Since the idea of the long tail is that there is a small consumer base for these items, they would have been very poor business in shops before the internet could be utilized. They would not have been able to sustain inventions that were so frivolous and so rarely bought. The creation of online business has really given these types of products a platform from which to reach many people. Viral marketing plays a huge roll as well, in that even if someone doesn’t buy an item, they get so excited by how cool it is that they share it on social media and it races around pages, giving it that chance to find someone willing to pay the extra cost for it. This business also wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for wealth. Most of these items have no practical purpose, or at least aren’t better at that purpose than more normal versions with the same intention (like a normal pizza cutter rather than a spatula-scissors pizza cutter). People have cash and they like having things that others don’t, or they like buying things that have to do with their favorite media (like a Star Trek coffee table). That alone is the fuel for the long tail trend. I love this trend, personally. I have a Tardis cookie jar from Dr. Who that makes sounds and lights up when it’s closed from Thinkgeek. I also have several t-shirts from Threadless and usually shop on that site for christmas presents. Not to mention I could browse This is Why I’m Broke for hours and I’ve compiled a wish list on there that will never be fulfilled (some stuff is really expensive). I, like many Americans, like unique things and have a little extra cash that I can allocate to this kind of purchase. I don’t have enough money to buy the super frivolous stuff or the expensive crafted geek furniture, but I would definitely be a consumer of those goods if I did. I love user-driven innovation because there are so many different styles, ideas, and creations that get to see the light, that would have otherwise been hidden in their own garages because of a lack of local market for them. My concept of self is intensified when I buy unique things that I’m interested in and that seem almost personally tailored to what I like. As a global consumer I think this is also really great. I have a panda hat from the UK that I ordered online from ModCloth. As long as the items can be shipped that far, and the seller/consumer are willing to ship them to/from different countries, long tail products can reach from any place to another that has internet. It’s another way that connects people globally and it allows an otherwise spread out culture to get excited together online. This culture points to the ideology of unique expression and living in excess. These are not necessity items but instead are almost a showing of status. It is status that we have the luxury to buy things like that as well as status showing that we are interesting people. It’s generally a culture produced by a comfortable lifestyle; a group of people who are not spending everything on physiological needs. Other than that, the long tail has a target market of extremely varying consumers. By the fact that it’s given a platform through the internet, it reaches anyone who has the internet and values individuality and uniqueness. However there are so many different kinds of products, between bacon bandaids and light-up pool tables, that it appeals to many different kinds of tastes and budgets. Any downturns in the economy will negatively affect the long tail. This is because there will be a little less excess cash devoted to purely intrinsic things. However I believe that this consumer culture is here to stay. People will always be creating and selling hobbies and there will always be other people out there wanting to spend money on things that they feel express them. This is a very unique culture offering equally unique products to a relatively small group of people per product. However with the varying tastes that the products appeal to, the flexibility of what can be marketed under this category and the varying range of prices these things sell for, it’s almost guaranteed to succeed no matter what happens. Either way, it’s definitely worth checking out right now. I suggest the mini ballista launcher. That’s classy.