Many of you have heard the stories about the Piraha tribe’s uber-simplistic numerical system: single, couple, many. Couple is several specifically identified singles, and many is everything else. So, let’s call it 1-2-Many. Even when they receive instruction on numbers above 2, they cannot (or will not) grasp those concepts. Their world has been defined for them already by the numbers through which they view the world.
Social scientists believe the tribe has the most primitive numeric concept of all human groups on Earth today, but we can learn a lot from them. Because few of us can count to Many.
For all our billions and trillions and google-plexes, most of us cannot count beyond Couple. In matters of business strategy, market segmentation, and product design, we continue to fixate on specific enumeration -- but an inventory of specifications is not equivalent to a generalization.
There is much talk today in business circles about the Long Tail -- specifically, how to profit from serving hyper-niched needs that compose the tail of the demand curve. To serve those needs economically, we need to approach product and technology and communication in radically different ways from our previous method of specific enumeration. We need to design for the unspecified Many, which should not be confused with the Mass.
The Mass is a market of a million undifferentiated (we think) singles. It is one specifically identifiable need, replicated a million times. And, it can be served with a single, centrally-delivered, homogeneous product or service. The Many is a million unique needs. It can be served economically only by a product or service that can morph to take on the character, functions, and feel desired by each One of the Many.
This is monu-Mentally hard, because for a long time we've been practicing counting only to Couple. It is easy to design software with drop-downs that allow a user to select any one of the set of specifically identified options for a certain function. It is harder to design software to allow for the user to define new options (not specifically identified by the designer in advance) and the associated new behaviors for that function. The same challenge exists for other disciplines, for instance Marketing. Imagine the power of marketing communications that evolve and morph as customers remix them to create micro-targeted WOM for niches that the marketer could not specifically identify a-priori.
That’s the power of counting to Many.