What is this age of the New Kind of Consumer like? Anderson describes it as, “…the end of spoon-fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions, and the rise of messy mosaics of information that require – and reward – investigation.” (p.190)
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Wagging the Market
A Review of The Long
Tail: Why the Future of |
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Before we get into all that, though, let’s review the book. The Long Tail is a volume on economics that is of staggering importance to the modern marketplace. Whereas most economics books and theories focus on the competition for scarce resources, Anderson dares to chart a new path with the economics of abundance. From Thomas Malthus to John Maynard Keynes, economists have worried about the problems of short supply. Anderson notes that, in the digital world populated by the likes of Google, eBay and iTunes, we need to worry about the problems of nearly infinite supply. The economics of abundance is mostly unexplored territory and Anderson does an excellent job pointing out significant features of this alien landscape, helping us to understand the unexpected dynamics left largely unexamined by traditional approaches to economics. Early in the book he compares the number of CDs sold by America’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart with a popular online music retailer, Rhapsody. Wal-Mart carries about 4500 unique CDs while Rhapsody (at the time of writing) carries about 1.5 million songs. The amazing thing is not that Rhapsody has so many songs, but that most of them are downloaded at least once a month. Because most of the songs Rhapsody sells never make it on Billboard’s Top 100, they really aren’t competing against Wal-Mart. In fact, about 40% of their total sales come from songs that never appear on Wal-Mart shelves. This is symbolic of a fundamental difference in economics. Wal-Mart tries to sell one album to a million people while Rhapsody tries to sell a million songs to one person. At first blush this may not look like a staggering difference since both companies want to sell a million units. The big difference is that Wal-Mart is looking for that One Product that reaches the lowest common consumer denominator while Rhapsody is willing to offer every single customer exactly what they want, even if it means offering a million (or two million) different products. How can Rhapsody, or any retailer for that matter, do this? Anderson calls this the Long Tail effect. He states, “The theory of the long tail can be boiled down to this: Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail (of the demand curve).” (52) This accounts for the “what” of long tail markets – fewer individual units of more and more different products – without telling us how these markets work. He spends the bulk of the book fleshing out six themes of the long tail that explain how such a market works:
This all sounds abstract, so what does it have to do with Christians and the church? The long tail represents not only the changing face of the marketplace; it also represents the changing face of our culture. The consumers in the market who demand personalized individual taste satisfaction as they load customized playlists into their iPods are the same consumers who attend church. As they grow accustomed to retailers who offer the ultimate in personalized service, the church runs the risk of losing them with one-size-fits-all traditions. Some would scoff and say that truth is non-negotiable and that we shouldn’t be in the business of catering to personal preferences. However, there are many aspects of church that are unrelated to truth. Whether it is the style of our music, or our order of services, much of what transpires is church is tradition rather than truth. There is a great deal about what we do that is negotiable. What is this age of the New Kind of Consumer like? Anderson describes it as, “…the end of spoon-fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions, and the rise of messy mosaics of information that require – and reward – investigation.” (190) When it comes to shopping online for music or surfing eBay for a bargain, we don’t find these individual investigators very threatening. But when it comes to the spoon-fed orthodoxy of our infallible religious institutions, suddenly we see things in a different light. The local church isn’t geared to provide a messy mosaic of information so much a systematic compendium of truth. Rarely do pastors and teachers encourage church members to explore other traditions and find out what other people believe. Instead, they fear that once people discover what else is available, they will leave for something better, or at least different. Church members are often discouraged or even warned against looking into other faith traditions. In the past, powerful social controls kept people from wandering too far from the tradition in which they were raised. The only recourse they had to satisfy their curiosity was to either visit a church outside their denomination or read a book that wasn’t on their church’s approved list, which risked raising the ire of church leaders or family members. Not so today. All that a curious Christian has to do in order to explore another faith tradition is to go online, check Wikipedia, run a Google search and they will be inundated with more information in an instant than they could have collected in hours at the library. If they are really curious they can download sermons, Bible study lessons, or even join online discussion groups and get personal answers to their questions. Best of all, they can do it comfortably and anonymously from home without fear of censure. Church leaders need to accept the fact that their people are more likely to have access to alternative interpretations of the Word of God than at any time in the past. Rather than discouraging exploration, they should equip their members to handle the ideas they will meet along the way. The challenge for contemporary Christianity is how to respond to the increasingly fractured landscape of church choice. Many of the mainstream and orthodox denominations have trouble retaining members. By contrast, many of the newer churches defy denominational descriptors and don’t fit neatly into conventional categories. They range from the small intimate congregations in the home church movement to the massive mega-churches populating urban and suburban landscapes. The benefit of all this variety is that sooner or later, searchers will find exactly the kind of church they are looking for. Some, like Drew Goodmanson are picking up on how this looks. See his “Five Trends for the Future of Church Planting” for the intersection of the Long Tail and church planting. The paradigm shift for most of us is to recognize that the choice that is right for us is not necessarily right for everyone. In a culture of unlimited choice, personal preference is rewarded rather than punished. Just because people don’t want to do things our way doesn’t mean they are wrong. Recovering fundamentalists and legalists often have a hard time distinguishing between personal preference and Truth. Sadly, many on the emerging side of the fence don’t catch on to the Long Tail effect any better than the denominations they leave. Much of the carping in the emerging church centers on how “The Church” has messed up and how they are here to rescue it from modernity. For all the lip service they give to a postmodern mindset, often they remain wedded to an either/or mindset. While I appreciate Goodmanson’s Five Trends, I lack his pessimism about established churches dying at a faster rate than ever before. He, and many others in the emerging church conversation, could benefit from a careful reading of The Long Tail. The economics of abundance in the ecclesiastical setting means that church goers don’t have to choose from a shortage of viable options. Just because I can download indie artists from Rhapsody, doesn’t mean I stop picking up my favorite CDs at Wal-Mart on sale, In the same way, church members enjoying the intimacy of a home Bible study group don’t have to abandon their massive megachurch worship service. Saturday night jam sessions at the Christian coffee house don’t prevent folks from attending their traditional liturgical services on Sunday morning. As long as the emerging and traditional churches view themselves as competitors with one another, neither of them will be positioned to anticipate the future. The explosive growth of the megachurch movement coupled with the parallel growth of the emerging church phenomenon point to a Long Tail effect in the arena of church choice. And best of all, church goers often opt for multiple options instead of picking The One Best Thing. If nothing else, we should abandon the competitive mindset and stop asking the question, “What will become of the church?” The explosive spread of Starbucks and its imitators did not bring about the downfall of Maxwell House and Folgers. If anything, Starbucks has actually helped branded coffee to increase in popularity. I anticipate that the emerging church phenomenon will benefit existing churches, and the growth along Goodmanson’s five trends will catalyze growth in many congregations outside the emerging sphere. Note some parallels between Goodmanson’s observations and Anderson’s long tail economics. Goodmanson says: “In America, churches will be planted at a faster rate in the next twenty years than we have witnessed before. God, Technology… technique (multi-site) and theological urgency will drive this. More and more of the pastors will come from the laity“ (Five Trends for the Future of Church Planting). Anderson says, in discussing Wikipedia, the collaborative, open-source encyclopedia, “The true miracle of Wikipedia is that this open system of amateur user contributions and edits doesn’t simply collapse into anarchy. Instead, it has somehow self-organized the most comprehensive encyclopedia in history.” (71) Clearly, “open source” church planting and church growth are already here and they experience a phenomenal rate of success. I think Anderson identifies the reason for this (even though he is not addressing churches at all) when he says, “The motives to create are not the same in the head as they are in the tail.” (73) What this means for denominations is that the motives of independent, church planters are not necessarily the same as denominational wonks engaged in spreading their influence and “dominating the market” in an ecclesiastical sense. Comparing “open source” church planters with denominational church planters is akin to comparing apples to orangutans – not even the same phylum, let alone species. One of the things Goodmanson fails to address is the concept of “massively parallel culture,” as Anderson describes it. The Long Tail portrays it as: “Whether we think of it this way or not, each of us belongs to many different tribes simultaneously, often overlapping…often not…. We share some interest with our colleagues, some with our families, but not all of our interests.” (184) We now live in an age where one size solutions no longer fit anyone very well. We have overlapping interests. The rise of ecumenical and parachurch groups that cross denominational boundaries (or ignores them altogether) give evidence of how massively parallel Christian culture is. Few people think of The Purpose Driven Life as a Baptist book just because it was written by a Baptist pastor. Instead, it crosses denominational lines. The Old Guard sees this as a threat to the established order. However, massively parallel Christian culture allows individuals to fellowship with folks who, in the past, they would never even meet in a religious setting. The beauty of the whole thing is that we are able to fellowship over commonalities without feeling like we have to force others into conformity with our particular system of belief. That, in my opinion, is the chief benefit of sub-denominational segmentation. by Rick Presley Read more about Long Tail economics at http://www.thelongtail.com/ |
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