Marketing Lessons From The Grateful Dead – Side A

Long Beach NY

15 April, 2021

10:49 AM

Description

Those who know me, know that I’m a huge fan of the Grateful Dead. Love their music. Enjoyed the crowds at concerts. Friends with many Deadheads. Never, though, did I ever imagine that we would garner some marketing lessons from this 1960s San Francisco counterculture band. But, it’s all there in Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History (Wiley, August 2010) written by David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan. Scott is an online marketing strategist who claims the group is a huge case study in contrarian marketing. Halligan is the CEO and co-founder of Hubspot, a marketing software company for the internet. He saw the Grateful Dead perform more than 100 times. The Dead were much more than rock-and-roll geniuses. They were marketing geniuses and the group would fit right in with the digital marketing strategies of the moment. Here are a few of the lessons that Scott and Halligan attributed to Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann & Mickey Hart. Carve out your own landscape. The group created a business model that was opposite every other band. Music and albums were a must, but not gold. Revenue was generated from the live concerts. Call it the fan “experience” or the concert as a business model. Choose memorable brand names. The Grateful Dead IS a memorable brand name. The dictionary defines it as a ballad that involves a hero who helps a corpse that is refused a proper burial. The name advanced the group as much as the music and the concerts. Selecting an uncommon name ensures that customers will not confuse the product with any other on the market. That works more than ever today as businesses reach for the top of the mountain called Search Engine Results. Mix up the marketing department. The group’s musicians may not have been the best, but their background diversity created a great combination. A mix of education, experiences and skill will make any company unique and prepared for the unknown challenges. Experiment. Each of the Dead’s 2,300 concerts was unique. Even when things may not have gone the way they hoped, they continued to improvise. We need to embrace new ideas to be heard in the marketplace. A marketing executive at a major international company once said to his people, “If it ain’t broke, break it!” Lose control of your marketing messages. A Grateful Dead concert was fun, meeting old friends and making new ones, listening to the music and chasing away the problems of the day. Sort of a freestyle way to operate. So, drop all the stuffed-shirt ways of operation and let go. Let the community find and like – and enjoy – you. I have several more Grateful Dead marketing lessons to share. Look for Side B of this article in a couple of weeks. Just save the link to this article and I will post the link to the flip side here when it is published.