Mens Et Opera - Reloaded

Hunter Valley, Australia Back from a fantastic 3-day event about online retail here in Australia. I wish I had the time to write an account of what I've learned, people I've met, and more importantly the great wine I tasted :-) One keynote session that I attended to was presented by a PIM vendor. I found it fine and informative. I also very much welcomed the effort of not mentioning the capabilities of their product and all the fluffy spin that you generally hear from vendors. Chapeau! However, in a split second she deftly found the opportunity to recommend retailers to forget the long tail and focus on the ‘head’. It is this focus on the head, the argument goes, that gives you a solid foundation to sell more. I have two problems with this argument but first of all, I'd encourage you to read what I wrote about the long tail here and here . In addition to that, I also have some reservations about the long tail strategy but they are of a completely different nature

As promised at the end of one of my recent pos ts , let's have a closer look at the long tail approach and how PIM supports it.  The driver for the long-tail model is customers expectations. In fact, they demand an increasingly larger and broader assortment of products through various online channels given that the shelf space is no longer a concern. The key insight here for independent retailers is that expanded offerings and selection can reveal demand that was otherwise not known to exist.  The benefit of a long-tail strategy is that products in the long tail can be sold against a higher margin. Aberdeen reports up to 29 % higher profits due to higher product margins in the long-tail assortment. The challenges for many companies, however, is the actual management of large assortments.  The graph below shows the relationship with the size of a company’s assortments and having a PIM system.  Retailers with and without PIM in relation to their assortment size ( Sou