Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Pre-tail seems to be one of the new buzzwords thrown around the CPG category. But what does it really mean, and should we be taking it seriously?

Pre-tail refers to the entire journey of the shopper before they reach the point of purchase. Product research, browsing social channels, building shopping lists, and organizing coupons and rewards all fall into the pre-tail category.

Various often-quoted studies by Point-of-Purchase Advertising International and The Marketing Science Institute have said that between 60 and 70% of purchase decisions are made at retail. Regardless of the exact number, that means at least 30 to 40% of consumers have made their decisions before they ever walk into a store, which is hardly insignificant. ...

Robert Moore from RJMetrics took this a step further, identifying that 11 percent (110,000) of the top 1M websites on the internet by Alexa traffic ranking are eCommerce sites and calculating the distribution of these websites in total numbers as well as by share of retail sales, and came up with some very interesting results shown in the table below.

From this research, we know that the top 1% (Amazon, eBay, Walmart among them) of the top visited eCommerce sites on the Internet are capturing 34% of total sales. This is unsurprising for such big companies, with huge brands, and huge marketing dollars backing them. We call this the “fat head” (vs. long tail) of eCommerce stores and it is a very elite group. In the mid tier, eCommerce stores that break into the top 500,000 in Alexa rankings make up 51% of the total businesses and 63% of total revenue, still a very healthy showing....