【管理辞典】长尾效应 / the long tail

「释义」

长尾效应，最初由《连线》的总编辑克里斯·安德森（Chris Anderson）于2004年发表于自家的杂志中，用来描述诸如亚马逊公司、Netflix和Real.com/Rhapsody之类的网站之商业和经济模式。

是指那些原来不受到重视的销量小但种类多的产品或服务由于总量巨大，累积起来的总收益超过主流产品的现象。在互联网领域，长尾效应尤为显著。

「应用场景」

颠覆型创业家的特性是急躁和激情，雇用的员工年轻又有强烈的饥饿感（不仅指对拉面的渴望）。这类初创公司不惧怕战争，反而急于加入战场。颠覆型公司肯定采取精益管理、反应迅速，而且极度注重增长。

The disruptive entrepreneur’s identity projects hustle and verve. The start-up is staffed by the young and the hungry (and not just for ramen noodles). It doesn’t fear the competitive war to come; rather, it’s eager to engage. It must be lean and quick to respond. And it is intensely focused on growth.

Netflix是这一象限的代表公司。创始人马克·伦道夫和雷德·黑廷斯对影片租赁的逾期罚款政策颇为不满，于是利用当时刚出现的DVD技术，制定了新解决方案。他们先通过美国邮局寄出光盘，然后在20世纪90年代末创办了新服务，允许电影爱好者用同样的方式接收和归还DVD。但这项服务不面向只想看最新大片的主流消费者。Netflix的战略是利用低成本内容的“长尾”，建立可以增进客户关系的推荐引擎，从而发展影片租赁的新方式，淘汰Blockbuster公司到店租片的模式。（Blockbuster最初并没有将Netflix看在眼里，认为该公司不能为主流客户提供即时服务，但后来发现自己的门店收益率下跌，最后根本不能盈利。）

Netflix is a poster child for this quadrant. Frustrated by movie-rental overdue fines, its founders, Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, envisioned a solution that would leverage the then-emergent technology of DVDs. After testing their concept by sending a disc through the U.S. mail, they created a service in the late 1990s that allowed cinephiles—rather than mainstream consumers who simply wanted to watch the latest blockbuster—to receive and return DVDs that way. Netflix’s strategy was to take advantage of the “long tail” of (low-cost) content and build a recommendation engine that would reinforce customer relationships, enabling the development of a new method of movie rental that would render the brick-and-mortar Blockbuster model obsolete. (Blockbuster initially dismissed Netflix as not serving mainstream customers in a timely manner but then saw the profitability of its stores drop and ultimately disappear.)

以上文字选自《哈佛商业评论》中文版2018年5月刊《初创公司战略法则》

乔舒亚·甘斯（Joshua Gans） 艾琳·斯科特（Erin L. Scott）斯科特·斯特恩（Scott Stern）丨文

马冰仑 丨编辑