Long Tail Marketing - The key to long term success?

I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about long tail marketing. Reflecting back on my own customers over the last decade it occurred to me that the ones who flourished, the ones who survived the downturn all utilized long tail techniques. It may have been something as simple as they had a wishlist that was searchable leading to the creation of 1000 tails into their site. Maybe they set up an affiliate program either internally or using an external one like Commision Junction. They may even had bi directional data exchanges with fulfillment houses to drop ship tens of thousands of products. In each case every single one of these customers is still in business.

Then there are the other ones. The customer who said "we don't want any more online sales than we get now, we can't handle the volume." They're online and offline store is out of business. The inefficiencies in their business could no longer allow them to be profitable. There are also the customers who rushed to make money during the boom, not even knowing what products to sell, but wanting to sell "something."

As I look around at the sites on the internet, I find it increasingly hard to find established sites that are not using some form of long tail marketing. I am beginning to think that long tail marketing is actually a discriminator between companies that will survive and companies that will fail.

I would love to have examples of successful stores not using long tail marketing. If you know of one, drop me a line.