Reading Reflection No. 3

I chose a book from the second half of the reading list, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson.

1. The general argument that Chris Anderson is making is that selling niche products is the future wave of business. He makes this argument through an analogy to help visualize the idea. By imaging a firm's revenue model on a hockey stick-shaped curve. A few products generate the most revenue and the multitude of other products form the tail of the curve, which just tapers off. Anderson argues that the tail's revenue, aka the niche products, can compete with the revenue from the most popular products if you sell enough of them. He then states that in today's day and age of content creation, almost anyone can create something of value so the tail gets exponentially longer. Finally, aggregators such as Amazon and Netflix and make accessing and purchasing the content easy, which makes the tail fatter, essentially driving up the revenue from these niche products.

2. The book connected with lessons I've learned about markets in ENT 3003. I've learned that it's better to target a specific audience than try to make a product that appeals to everyone. This book is saying something similar by emphasizing the importance of niche products. Of course, niche products have their own very specific niche markets. By targeting the niche markets, and with the help of aggregators which streamline the process of selling and revenue collection, niche products can outsell some of the most popular products. The first step to selling the products is determining who your market is and this class has taught me a lot about how to pinpoint my own market and what kinds of questions I should be asking myself when doing so.

3. An exercise I could design for ENT 3003 based on this book would be about niche markets. The exercise would ask you whether you think your product or service is niche. Second, it would say, if you think your product is niche, explain its niche market and how you would utilize aggregators to generate revenue. If your product or service isn't niche, think of a niche product or service that's related to yours and explain its niche market and how that product or service could use aggregators.

4. I was surprised about the book's emphasis on aggregators' importance in selling niche products to niche markets. I didn't even think about how large of a role companies like Amazon and Netflix play in the businesses that market and sell niche things. For example, previously when people tried to find a specific, uncommon book they would have to go to bookstores and physically look for the book and if it wasn't in any then they were out of luck. Nowadays people can go to Amazon and search for that book in a matter of seconds and the effort you have to put into the search is effortless. This applies to any niche product that sells on Amazon. Personally, I just bought joystick grips for my Xbox One controllers off of Amazon, and if it weren't for Amazon listing that product I bought, I don't know if I would have found it or even have been to buy joystick grips.