marketing to the long tail

Chris Anderson's book has spawned a lot of guff about what the long tail means for marketing. A new epilogue to the book outlines his more considered view on this topic:

if you're selling things, you don't necessarily need to massively expand your product range to tap LT markets. You can instead just reach the "long tail of customers", which is to say all the potential pockets of demand that don't necessarily lie within your normal marketing channels. This is the smaller potential customers, the ones you don't know about, the ones you never considered and the ones who didn't even think they were potential customers until they heard about your products from someone they know.