Dead-On Business Rules:
Ten Tie-Dyed and True Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead
Viral marketing and social networking have arrived on the scene after a long,
strange trip indeed. The Grateful Dead were much more than a bunch of
rock-and-roll geniuses; they were pioneers of the digital age marketing
landscape.
By David Meerman Scott
When you think marketing visionaries, what
companies come to mind? Apple? Google? Maybe even Microsoft? It’s true that each
of these companies in one way or another has come to define marketing in the
digital age. But the practices they’ve been pushing—viral marketing, social
networking, giving away products or services, asking for and acting on input
from customers—have somewhat, well, groovier roots than you might imagine.
These marketing ploys were born on the road with one of the most iconic bands of
all time—The Grateful Dead.
Everyone knows the Grateful Dead as rock legends and amazing musicians. But
not as many realize they were marketing pioneers. In the 1960s the Grateful Dead
pioneered many social media and inbound marketing concepts that businesses
across all industries use today. Every business can learn from what the Grateful
Dead has done over a 45-year career.
Brian Halligan and I provide an overview of the band’s marketing genius in
our new book Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History
(Wiley, August 2010, ISBN:
978-0-470-90052-9, $21.95). Each of the 19 chapters presents and analyzes a
marketing concept practiced by the Dead and provides a real-world example of a
company employing that concept today. The goal? To show you how to think and
market like the band—which is to say, in a way completely unlike your
competition. The Grateful Dead is one huge case study in contrarian marketing.
Most of the band’s many marketing innovations were based on doing the exact
opposite of what other bands (and record labels) were doing at the time. The
Dead pioneered a “freemium” business model, allowing concert attendees to record
and trade concert tapes, building a powerful word-of-mouth fan network powered
by free music. It’s a model that has influenced many of today’s very best
marketers. Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead is filled not only with
information about the band and how they came to be loved by so many, but also
with advice on how the Dead’s marketing brilliance can be used in today’s
business world. For example: Carve out your own landscape.
The Grateful Dead
created a business model that was the exact opposite of every other band’s at
the time. Rather than focusing on selling albums, they focused on generating
revenue from live concerts, and in doing so created a fan “experience” that was
unlike any other. The concert-as-business-model worked, and the Dead created a
passionate fan base that became an underground cult that catapulted the Grateful
Dead into the rock-and-roll stratosphere. Products that are highly
differentiated can still succeed today, but it’s much harder to win if your
business model is the same as your competitors’. Your job is to do research
about your industry in order to build a killer business model. You want to break
free from the competitive landscape and create a cascade of unique benefits for
your customers. Today’s big winners typically win because of unique business
model assumptions, rather than some new technology or complicated improvements.
Prime examples include Netflix (vs. Blockbuster) and iPod and iTunes (vs. MP3s
and downloading). Like the Grateful Dead, these companies turned the core
assumption of how their industry works on its head to create an unlevel playing
field for themselves. Choose memorable brand names. Love it, hate it, or don’t
understand it—whatever you may think of it, the Grateful Dead is a name that you
remember. The dictionary defines the term as a type of ballad involving a hero
who helps a corpse who is being refused a proper burial. For the Grateful Dead,
the strange cosmic quality the name evokes—a world beyond consciousness—was
perfect. Fast-forward to four decades later and the name seems ideal. The choice
of name worked to help advance the Grateful Dead to its widely recognized status
as the most iconic band in history.
When you select an uncommon name—one appropriate to your company image and
target market—it’s unlikely that consumers will confuse your product with
something similar. They will remember you. And in today’s world of online
communications and of search engines, unique names for your company, products,
and services allow you to own the search engine results for your brands.
Mix up your marketing department. Some argue that the Grateful Dead were not
the best musicians, but their deeply diverse backgrounds made for a powerful
combination that created a sound unlike any other. In addition to having
musicians with diverse backgrounds, the Grateful Dead often had musicians with
very little experience and even less formal education. The mix of unique
backgrounds unencumbered by conventional wisdom proved to be a powerful
combination.
Does your marketing team look like everyone else’s? If so, it’s time for a
change in organization, some new skill development, and new blood. Organize
your marketing team in this way: You want someone responsible for “getting
found” (filling the top of your funnel), someone responsible for “converting”
the folks who are getting pulled in, and someone responsible for “analyzing” the
numbers and helping you make better decisions. Look outside your marketing
department (inside your company) and look outside the marketing industry
(outside your company) to fill in talent gaps. Experiment! (No, not with what
you’re thinking!) The Grateful Dead played over 2,300 concerts and each one was
completely unique due to their improvisational style. The Grateful Dead
experimented with musical forms and genres—both as a group and
individually—creating unique musical experiences. Despite the occasional poor
performance, they didn’t become conservative and stop experimenting. They
continued to push the edge and learn from the mistakes they made in the process.
Like the Grateful Dead, marketers today need to experiment in their craft in
order to make big breakthroughs. Instead of seeing failure as something to be
avoided, CEOs and management teams need to free their marketers to experiment,
quickly learn from failure, and experiment again. Like music, marketing is a
creative discipline. Instead of worrying about making mistakes, you should be
doing at least five times more experiments than you are likely doing today. In
terms of marketing, this could mean starting a blog, freeing your employees to
Tweet or write posts for your blog, or leaving comments on others’ blogs.
Lose
control of your marketing messages. A Grateful Dead concert was about having
fun, meeting friends, checking out great music, escaping the everyday,
belonging. Each person defined the experience a little differently, and the
group defined the whole. There were interesting subgroups wandering along as
part of the larger odyssey that was the Grateful Dead experience.
In building a community, the Grateful Dead were willing to give up a large
degree of control over how they were defined and instead hand it to their fans.
While this approach is highly unusual, it is also often very successful. When
organizations insist on operating in a command-and-control environment with
mission statements, boilerplate descriptions, messaging processes, and PR
campaigns, their strategies can both hamper growth and backfire in execution.
Let your community define you, rather than trying to dictate what’s said—and
how—about your company. When you let others define and talk about you, it is
more likely that a community will develop.
Put fans in the front row. Unlike nearly every other band, the Grateful Dead
controlled the ticket sales for their concerts. While other bands moved toward
selling tickets through electronic systems of the day, like Ticketron, and
later, Ticketmaster, the Grateful Dead established their own in-house ticketing
agency in the early 1980s. The system allowed the Grateful Dead to announce
tours to fans first and treated supporters to the best seats, driving passionate
loyalty.
The Grateful Dead teaches us to treat customers with care and respect. Yet we
see so many organizations that do precisely the opposite. Instead of putting
loyal customers first, they ignore them while they try to get new ones. While
we’re all for growing a business, we don’t think it should come at the expense
of annoying existing customers. Always remember, your most passionate fans are
also the people who tell your stories and spread your ideas. Free your
content. Unlike other bands, the Grateful Dead encouraged concertgoers to record
their live shows, establishing “taper sections” behind the mixing board where
fans’ recording gear could be set up for best sound quality. The Grateful Dead
set their music free by allowing and encouraging these tapers. You would have
thought that giving their music away would have diminished their success, but
actually, it was fuel on the fire. The band removed barriers to their music by
allowing fans to tape it, which in turn brought in new fans and grew sales.
The takeaway here is that when we free our content, more people hear about our
company and eventually do business with us. The way to reach your marketplace is
to create tons of free content like blogs, videos, white papers, and e-books.
This is because each piece of content you create attracts links from other
websites. When you give content or small pieces of your product away, it
attracts a lot more interest and really opens up the top of your marketing
funnel in a dramatic way. Partner with those who are eager to sell your stuff.
Most bands prohibit the sale of merchandise in parking lots because they want to
ensure that only “official” merchandise is being sold. While the Grateful Dead
also sold their own gear inside, they partnered with the vendor community,
resulting in some very creative uses of the band’s “Steal Your Face” logo, such
as on baby clothes.
Find the entrepreneurs who would like to make money from your brand and work
with them to do so. Do you have people selling versions of your products and
services that seem in competition to your direct sales efforts? Maybe the right
thing to do is to partner with those entrepreneurs rather than send them a legal
notice.
Better yet, proactively find and approach companies that seem to be
competitors and work out a way to help one another. For example, if you’re a
realtor, why not forge a partnership with a home improvement company?
Manufacturers or retailers of baby and children’s products should work out a
deal to sell merchandise on so-called “mommy-blogger” sites. Give Grateful-ly.
The Grateful Dead frequently threw their support behind causes and ideas they
believed in, especially anything related to improving life in their home base of
San Francisco. Giving back to the community became an essential element of the
band’s brand image. At the band’s regular shows, they invited favorite
organizations to set up tables in the hallways and educate fans on issues like
organ donation and voter registration. Concertgoers knew the Dead’s commitment
was authentic and that added to the perception of the band’s positive and
supportive approach to making music and helping people improve their lives.
A consistent and sustained level of giving back to the community is of
significant benefit to companies. When a company carefully chooses a particular
charity or cause to support and makes it a part of their corporate culture,
continuing the commitment over many years, the accrued benefits to both the
brand and the recipient charity can be enormous. Do what you love—even if it
takes a while to get it right. Because the Grateful Dead loved what they did,
they stuck with it and (obviously) eventually prospered. That passion helped
them persevere through some very rough times. For example, on the first gig they
booked, they were contracted to perform two nights in a row. They were so bad
the first night that the owner of the joint replaced them with three elderly
gentlemen in a jazz band. The band members were so embarrassed they didn’t even
bother asking the owner for their one night’s pay. Rather than throw up their
hands and give up, the band went back to the studio and doubled down on the
practice routines. It actually took several years and a great deal of practice
before they really started getting good market traction with their unique sound.
The Grateful Dead teach us to live our own dreams—not someone else’s. Not only
does doing what you love increase your odds of success, but it dramatically
increases your happiness. You spend more than 50 percent of your waking adult
life working, so you might as well do what you love. Doing something you don’t
enjoy during more than 50 percent of your waking adult life takes a toll on your
psyche that goes well beyond the boundaries of the workplace. Conversely, doing
what you love pays huge dividends in your personal life. Instead of obsessing
over recording, the Dead became the most popular touring band of their era,
selling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of tickets, and creating a highly
profitable corporation in the process. Without hit records, the Grateful Dead
achieved elite success, becoming one of the most iconic rock bands of their era
and inventing a brand that democratically included their consumers and literally
co-created a lifestyle for Deadheads. We were eager to write this book because
we’ve identified many lessons in what the band has been doing for more than 40
years that can be applied today. These lessons are an important tool for helping
to understand the new marketing environment in a language and with examples that
are familiar to all. It’s knowledge that we hope will keep you and your business
“rocking on” for a long time to come. Order
Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History
from Amazon.com. About the
Authors:
David Meerman Scott
Since his first Grateful Dead show when he was a teenager in 1979, David Meerman
Scott has seen the band perform over 40 times. David is a marketing strategist
and a professional speaker. He is the author of the BusinessWeek bestselling
book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and several other books. He speaks at
conferences and corporate events around the world. He loves to surf (but isn’t
very good at it), collects artifacts from the Apollo moon program, and maintains
a database, with 308 entries at this writing, of every band he has seen in
concert. He is a graduate of Kenyon College, where he listened to a heck of a
lot of Grateful Dead in his dorm room. Brian Halligan
Brian Halligan has seen the Grateful Dead perform more than 100 times. He is CEO
& founder of HubSpot, a marketing software company that helps businesses
transform the way they market products by “getting found” on the Internet. Brian
is also coauthor of Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and
Blogs and is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at MIT. In his spare time, he sits on
a few boards of directors, follows his beloved Red Sox, goes to the gym, and is
learning to play guitar. About the Book:
Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the
Most Iconic Band in History (Wiley, August 2010, ISBN: 978-0-470-90052-9,
$21.95) is available at bookstores nationwide, major online booksellers, or
directly from the publisher by calling 800-225-5945. In Canada, call
800-567-4797. Founded in 1807, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., has
been a valued source of information and understanding for 200 years, helping
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