The Long Tail

Research Papers on The Long Tail can be about the concept or about the book written by Chris Anderson. Business and MBA students can get help with research papers from Paper Masters.

The long tail is a statistical concept in which some distributions of numbers have a significant number of occurrences far from the central part of the distribution. Probability distributions are said to have a long tail when larger shares fall outside the range of normal distribution. Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010) is known as the "father of the long tail."

Anderson's The Long Tail

In more recent years, Chris Anderson's 2006 book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More has come to bring the phrase "the long tail" into the business world. In his book, Anderson argues the following:

• Products that are usually in low demand or ones that have low sales volumes will eventually build a better market share for companies.
• The Long Tail concept has been applied to retail strategy, such as with Amazon, in the selling of a large number of unique items, but only selling a few of each item.

Anderson maintained that businesses are moving towards having a large number of niche markets. Since there is no longer the need for a retailer to maintain physical store shelf space (think Amazon, again), narrow-interest goods and services can be provided with relative low cost. It is the aggregate of all of these small markets that allows a business to compete with the existing large market. Most of this business model would not be possible without the Internet, which has freed businesses from the necessity of maintaining bricks and mortar establishments.