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‘More of More’

Variety works and keeps customers coming back only if the base is good, the choices are aplenty and equal in taste, and the experience is memorable.

This is the case for Valencia, a small Venezuelan restaurant in Norwalk, CT.  

They’ve mastered the art of the empanada, offering endless choices of fill ins including my favorites queso with chicken, guacemole, or melon.  You can even make a chocolate-banana empanada.

The prices per empanada are $2 - $4, enough to get two or maybe even three if you’re really hungry.  

Valencia has mastered the product long-tail, the benefit of unlimited choice that meets any niche taste. Eating there is the food equivalent of Amazon.com, endless array of products at reasonable prices and awesome and swift customer service you don’t forget.  

Had Valencia and Amazon just had one niche product, a slow customer experience, and a boring environment people would forget it and move on to find something else.

Valencia and Amazon are unique in that instead of selling less of more, they actually sell ‘more of more.’  A company can afford to expand its variety in a mass of niche desires.  There’s something for everybody.

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Undermining the 80/20 Rule

Pareto’s 80/20 principle is typically a good rule of thumb for everything, from the most popular revenue generating products to figuring out the most effective use of our time.

But in the ad driven and stumbleupon world, the 80/20 gets skewed; there’s tons of products that get heavily promoted combatted by tons of products that people randomly discover.  Both paid and organic media drive a lot of hits.  Youtube videos are the perfect example of this.

Chris Anderson’s long-tail theory empowers the mass of niches against the hit, especially for free stuff like videos on Youtube.  And Pareto’s theory is a good way to look at what’s actually driving revenue.

Make everything available and see what happens.

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