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Drillteam is a brand innovation company which follows a 2.0 approach to engaging consumers.
Our sweet spot: the hyper-mediated, time-shifting, ad-skipping, lean-forward consumer.
Our expertise: moving beyond the 1.0 model of broadcasting a singular message to 2.0 engagement. We interact directly with these influential consumers to co-create your brand.
Social networks. Blogs. Web 2.0. Word of mouth. Influencers. Live event activation. Brand ambassador networks. Online Collaboration Tools. Engagement. Relevance. It’s all connected through a mindset of interactivity and consumer control. This 2.0 world requires something more than new tactics. It requires a new approach. A new process.
That approach is what we call collaboration. You want some help navigating? Good. That’s what we do.
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Stepping on the Long Tail |
Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail" theory wise widely accepted in Silicon Valley as a rationale in favor of online niche vs. mass business models. The basic premise: Amazon can carry an infinite number of titles, so a narrowly targeted bundle of products can be as economically attractive as more mainstream products, if not more so. Companies are encouraged to move away from the blockbuster strategy that invested the most amount of money in the few, high potential hits that can generate the greatest rewards.
A Harvard Researcher has recently debunked this theory in a report from HBR, Should You Invest in the Long Tail? Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard's business school takes a statistically rigorous approach to entertainment and cultural industries to investigate whether a niche strategy can be a profitable one.
Using data from Rhapsody (one of the favorites in the Long Tail book), Neilsen Video and Soundscan, and an Australian DVD-by-mail company Quickflix, Prof. Elberse looked at data for online video rentals and song purchases, and discovered that offline and offline patterns of shopping behavior essentially the same. Anderson has replied on his own blog, begging semantic and definitional differences between how one describtes a hit and non-hit, or "head" of a curve and "tail," but overall Elberse can back her claims with clearer data.
Mr. Anderson responded on his Long Tail blog, saying much of the difference between his analysis and hers involved how hits and non-hits, or "head" and "tail" in the book's lingo, are measured. Aside from that, he was generous in praising the article, and said he welcomed the sort of rigorous scrutiny the theory was getting.
What does this mean for consumer behavior? The "water cooler era" is not yet over - people congregate around hits not just because we are interested in mainstream tastes, but because we are all social beings that want to share a common cultural dialogue. This dynamic is further accentuated online. Additionally, Anderson's claim that a small group of fanatics drive the demand curve for obscure products was also undone. It turns out that the people that consume obscure products are simply heavy consumers of said products. They like and gravitate toward mainstream and obscure alike, and interestingly they have a greater fondness for the blockbuster. As Prof. Elberse states, "there is no segment with a particular taste for the obscure."
What does this mean for marketers? We've seen this recently through ethnography studies on indie culture. Indie music lovers are primarily music lovers - they take in blockbuster hits, but spend so much time hunting down music that they love that they tend to include more obscure, local bands into their iTunes list. The niche identity indie music lovers may have felt 10-15 years ago when it was a small, edge group of people is replaced by a mashup of mainstream and indie lifestyle. Young adults in particular don't want to choose an identity type and live within a specific niche, and there is real value to brands in learning how to navigate the shift between mass and more localized communities.
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BY JEN
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