New Logics-Scaling the Tail

The major premises of Chris Anderson’s “long tail” theory are presented here with implications for emerging markets. Anderson’s formulation is that, under specific conditions, value will not reside in the mean, but in the peripherals (or the tail). Hence, overall sales form peripherals or the “long tail” will outnumber sales from the mean of the distribution. As applied to emerging markets, value-creation reflects a shift from supply to demand considerations: entry in mass consumption markets is ceding ground to investments in smaller but propitious market segments, many of which were largely unfilled in the past. After a review of three types of scaling used in prior studies, we adopt a new type based on features of agglomeration for the clustering of multi-brand linkages—contiguous interconnections.