Lean Thinking and The Long Tail Of Marketing

What a perfect combination: lean thinking and long tail marketing! Perhaps a little explanation is in order though.

Lean thinking is a way of approaching the manufacture, sales and distribution of goods and services. It strives to eliminate waste on every front. Consider the marketing giant Amazon, for a moment. You can find almost anything imaginable on Amazon, and they are able to ship it to you extremely quickly, and at a great price.

How does lean thinking work? 

By using lean thinking and the principles associated with this revolutionary approach to business. They have networks of suppliers who produce and warehouse the merchandise, while Amazon simply takes the order and dispatches it to the supplier.

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 This has eliminated an enormous amount of waste. Amazon does not need to purchase the raw materials, specialized manufacturing equipment, maintain a workforce, or store and ship the goods. Instead, the long supply chain of individual suppliers takes care of this.

What is the long tail?

In a traditional bell curve, most of the sales volume lies in the small, center portion of the curve. This has totally changed in recent years. Now, the sales volume of the tiny orders of one and two pieces actually equals or exceeds the center portion.

This can be illustrated by Amazon once again. Sure, they sell a lot of the hot items, the blockbuster products. On the other hand, they sell an almost infinite amount of single, unpopular items. These one and two piece sales equal the volume of the blockbusters. This is the long tail in action.

The internet is the reason this is possible. Today, almost anything is available to anybody, anywhere at any time. This has never happened before in history.

Conclusion

If business wants to compete and win in the new, global marketplace, it needs to employ lean thinking.

It is not enough to continually get new customers or work faster or make more. By looking at the waste in the entire operation, many opportunities will present themselves.

The Toyota Motor Company, who basically invented lean thinking as a process, is a wonderful example of lean thinking and the long tail. By using the processes of lean manufacturing and having a vision for the long tail of marketing, they are today in the enviable position to become the number one producer of automobiles in the US!

If you want to learn how to use the lean process, I highly recommend the Lean Manufacturing web-based training course. You will get a thorough understanding of all the components of lean manufacturing, including Value Stream Mapping, six sigma, 5S and much more.

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