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New Logics-Scaling the Tail

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

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  5. For a good discussion of brand extensions and positioning, see Roger J. Best, Market-Based Management: Strategies for Growing Consumer Value and Profitability (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999).

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  8. The concept originated in the study of linkages and positive externalities arising from location and proximity. See Masahisa Fujita and Jacques-Francois Thisse, Economics of Agglomeration, Industrial Location, and Regional Growth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). We have adopted this phenomenon in this study as relating to positive externalities arising from the interdependence and synergy among related brands, as perceived by a large segment of consumers.

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© 2015 Seung Ho Park, Gerardo R. Ungson, and Andrew Cosgrove

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Park, S.H., Ungson, G.R., Cosgrove, A. (2015). New Logics-Scaling the Tail. In: Scaling the Tail: Managing Profitable Growth in Emerging Markets. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137538598_4

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