In his must read ‘Long Tail’ blog, Chris Anderson recounts the horror that is a trip to WalMart’s music section.
In a world of plenty – all the buying muscle that WalMart can flex – Anderson finds nothing but banality and only a handful (around 5,000) of the more than 800,000 titles one can find on Amazon, for example.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the music long tail, the Fairfield County Weekly reports that local record shops are hanging in, barely.
I’ve written about this before but it warrants repeating, especially in the context of public / media relations and marketing – increasingly there are two cultures. One is at the head of the long tail where they shop at WalMart, watch cable news and have PCs infected with spyware.
The other is at the end of the long tail. They shop online from places like Cafe Press or Archie McPhee, get their news from Memeorandum and scour eBay for Joy Division flexi-disks.
I’m generalizing of course but for those of us who think about the ‘public’ in public relations, it’s increasingly important to understand the difference between the mass market and the micro markets that are emerging. Sometimes your audience is shopping at WalMart, other times they’re at Trash American Style hunting down that elusive Black Flag EP.
Technorati Tags: culture, long tail, marketing, public relations
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