A couple of weeks ago, there was an article in the WSJ about how Klezmer music didn't do very well in a test at Wal-Mart.
So, is anybody shocked that "Great Songs of the Yiddish Stage" didn't fly out the door? Probably not. But for followers of "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson, this is a bulls-eye, in the flesh example of what he's talking about. While this sort of niche music is perfectly suited to the web (provided you've got the tools to help your target audience find it), the big box stores can't handle it profitably (and actually look kind of silly when they try), so they wind up carrying the same predictably boring assortment and reducing the music they carry to a commodity.
There's more: Business Week recently did a short piece on Whole Foods' approach to bringing products from small local providers into their assortment. This shows how an aspect of "The Long Tail" can actually work in bricks & mortar. When the merchant has a keen understanding of the customers and suppliers at a local level, carrying selective niche products can be highly profitable and differentiating. Obviously keen understanding wasn't a factor with the Klezmer music.
And, in an example of "The Long Tail" at it's purest, CNET News recently ran a piece about a small watchmaker in Switzerland that's letting customers build their own one-of -a kind Swiss watches on line at a site called 121time.com . It's worth going to the site and building an imaginary watch just to go through the UI, which is meticulously well thought through, and the visual renderings were good enough to make me want to buy the $3000 watch that I built. No brick & mortar store can do that.
While we're on the subject of the challenges of assortment planning, let's not forget about how important pricing is in the equation. There was a great article recently in Forbes about DemandTec, Inc. who's developed software to help retailers make pricing and assortment decisions. I love this. This is the kind of thing that product-centric merchants have been doing manually and intuitively for years - and when you start to apply the science to it, you see how much money we're leaving on the table.
Interestingly, the introduction of this sort of science and the infusion of near real time customer intelligence into the assortment & pricing equation is one of the big reasons merchants and marketers are fighting so much (see my last post for more on this).
So, would all of this pricing science have helped Wal-Mart sell more Klezmer music? I doubt it. But it might have warned them not to carry it in the first place.
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