Consumer Demographics in Business

The Smiling Curve made me think of the Long Tail...

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of certain business such as Amazon.com or Netflix. However, the concept of a frequency distribution with a long tail — the concept at the root of Anderson's coinage — has been studied by statisticians since at least 1946. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or "non-hit" items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail.