Week 3 Analysis

Another week of interesting materials!  It was a bit of a challenge to get through everything given a busy week of business travel and KD graduation, but I was able to get through all the material and was glad that I did.

I listed to both Gil and Frank’s discussion on the Long Tail, as well as Chris Anderson’s writing about it, and had some of my own thoughts.  I am skeptical as to whether online advancements have really served to push a larger percentage of sales toward the Long Tail.  On the contrary, it seems to be that online availability (i.e. iTunes, Amazon, etc) would increase sales across the board.  I tend to believe that those folks who are interested in purchasing more small-name novelty products were buying those even before these items became available on iTunes and Amazon.  For example, if total record sales were 100 and 10% of them were the Long Tail items, I believe that the absolute number of sales would significantly increase as distribution of records go online (i.e. on iTunes), while still only 10% of the sales were in the Long Tail.  Therefore, everyone wins.  More of the “hits” will sell, as will more of the Long Tail items.  I’d be interested in seeing empirical data that would agree with or refute my thoughts, as I’m not convinced that the Long Tail is benefiting comparatively more than the mainstream hits.

The NPR audio regarding Twitter was especially relevant because I am just getting started on Twitter, thanks to this class.  For the longest time, I asked the exact question that the segment focused on: what is the point of Twitter?  However, after using it for a few weeks, much like many of the people interviewed in the NPR piece, I’ve found that Twitter serves as a great resource for true real-time news.  As an example, as much as I hate to admit it, a few weeks back I was quite interested in finding out who the next “Bachelorette” would be, which was being announced on The Jimmy Kimmel Show.  However, I was not near a television at the time, so I relied on the Twitter community tweeting the news in order for me to find out.  Another example was just yesterday as I was driving back to Bloomington and was stuck in standstill traffic on I-70, I relied on Twitter to inform me what the cause of the jam was.  While I have not been tweeting myself (I used Facebook’s status updates instead), I have been impressed with how the Twitter community can serve as a great source for up to the minute news.

Finally, I wanted to comment on the two pieces on changing marketing strategies and market segmentation.  The seven segments was an interesting piece as it focused more on the reasons that consumers go online and how to market to them rather than segmenting them based on typical demographics.  I tend to think that a combination of both the traditional demographic segmentation and the new online strategies are needed.  The seven segments described are interesting but I feel that they may not be all-encompassing.  There are bound to be other consumers going online that do not fall into one of those segments.  Therefore, it seems to be that utilizing traditional demographic based market segmentation as well will ensure that companies have a grasp of all their potential customers and their market segments.