Respect Zipf’s Law

Some questions to get you thinking:

• Of all the words written and spoken in American English, which are the three most common? (Hint: I’ve used those three in the preceding sentence. Can you spot them?)
• How much more common is the most common word than the second most common word? (For instance, is the most common word in American English used about twice as often as the second most common word?)
• What’s any of this have to do with boosting retailer profitability?

     Please take a little time to come up with your answers. Then read on for my answers:

• Based on an analysis of a million-word representative compilation by researchers at Brown University, the three most common words, in order, are “the,” “of,” and “and.”
• The most common word does indeed occur about twice as often as the second most common word. That second most common word occurs about 125% as often as the third most common. This sort of frequency distribution occurs with other phenomena, too, such as the sales figures for the top seller in a category compared to sales figures for the second-best seller. It’s called Zipf’s Law after Harvard University linguistics professor George Kingsley Zipf, who described it.
• Why am I telling you about this? Because Zipf’s Law is a reminder that we can boost profitability by looking at how to get the best from current resources before deciding to add on the expenses of new resources. You see, researchers at Santa Fe Institute and Spain’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra say that Zipf’s Law holds for word frequency because we want to be as efficient as possible in our communications. People add words to their language only if the current words can’t do the job adequately. Therefore, the top-ranked words get not just a little more, but rather much more, usage than the ones further down the line.

     Adding new customers is necessary for retailing success. But remember that it’s much less expensive to keep a current customer than to prospect for new customers. Exploring new sales channels might be a good move for you. But take care not to be attracted solely by the novelty at the risk of closing off existing sales channels.

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