The Long Tail

Living on the tail in the business world means offering what the customer wants.

Heads and tails.

When you hear those words, you probably think of a coin toss. This afternoon, all across the country, football players will gather at the 50-yard line, and a coin toss will determine the team that receives the kickoff.

But we don’t want to talk about football. We want to talk about cats. About their heads and their tails.

In the business and financial world, a cat is a bizarre metaphor for sales and merchandise.

Taking publishing, for example. You’ve got your best-selling authors like John Grisham, Steven King, Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown and so on. Walk into a bookstore and you will never have any trouble finding books by popular authors and only popular authors.

That limitation is the head of the cat.

Or DVDs. Go to Blockbuster, or Hollywood Videos, and chances are you will have no trouble getting a DVD of most of the movies out last summer: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, The Dukes of Hazzard, War of the Worlds, as well as other recent titles. And...