All of the consultants I've been asked to meet with the last few years have made mention of Chris Anderson's Long Tail Theory. Sean Branagan was especially excited about how we (University College) might be able to apply the theory to marketing/selling higher education "products."
This article, while focusing on commercial product selling, seems to refute the core proposal of Anderson's theory: that the Internet is changing everything we know about marketing and selling. A short quote from the article:
"The Web is clearly changing cultural consumption patterns, but those changes don't seem to involve the sort of drastic flattening of demand curves predicted by the Long Tail. While whole new cultural categories -- YouTube videos, for example -- are indeed emerging, they seem to quickly settle into the same winner-take-all dynamic experienced in the pre-Google age. Don't toss out those old paradigms just yet."
This short blog post from Robert Scoble reminded me that while Anderson's theory is intriguing, at UC we continue to do the core technologies and strategies extremely well, especially when you consider the budgetary and staffing constraints in which we perform.
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