As part of the long tail theory, Chris Anderson mentioned that consumers will organise themselves into relatively small groups with similar tastes. Companies would then have to address each of these groups individually, rather than trying to create some sort of lowest common denominator product. I would expect publishers as a result to be trying to infiltrate these burgeoning groups to try and get them to integrate their brand as part of their identity. Am I right?
On the Penguin UK page, there is a section devoted to reading groups. These groups can submit their details for submission in a directory, and even enter competitions hosted by Penguin. They can also partake in interviews of Penguin published authors. Is all this an effort to market to the Long Tail?
No. The format might lead one to think so, but these reading groups are treated as a mass, and are all recommended the same books. This marketing initiative is almost certainly based on the Oprah/Richard and Judy book club model.
Penguin do have some mini-sites based on book categories, but these are still recognisably Penguin and do not differ greatly from each other.
All of the publishers I visited online had the same sort of setup, so I started to search by book title, and started with the biggest literary franchise I could think of.
The Tolkien minisite is not easy to recognise as a Harper Collins offshoot. It is perfect in its combination of forum, artist b/g info and bookselling, but is very hard to find through either a search engine or the HC site. It also looks great, and is endorsed by Tolkien’s son.
I got the impression that this example could be replicated by publishers for any major brand, and that such a website would prove very useful in promoting related products. Especially if it was ranked highly under carefully chosen Google search terms, and imaginatively constructed.
Doubleday (RH) did much the same for the Da Vinci Code. They built a sort of computer online treasure hunt based on Da Vinci’s works. This hunt is at all times accompanies by a link to buy the book.
I have concluded that the publishers are not yet seeing their market as being fragmented, or at least not fragmented enough to warrant significant marketing outlay for these niches. Will small publishing houses ever have enough of a budget to address niche markets in this way? Probably not. But with the growth in user-generated web content it should prove quick and cheap to recruit a myspace page or fan site to do this job for them…
I will definitely have to follow this up.
