Listen To The Band
Implementing nontraditional methods and best-practice business decisions, the Grateful Dead has had a remarkable 30-year run as a rock icon. Follow their lead, and keep your business truckin'.
Radical marketing, by its very nature, can be applied by
organizations both large and small across a wide diversity of
industries. It often finds a champion in the most unlikely
places.
The Grateful Dead, for example, would seem a strange bedfellow
in any collection of exemplary business organizations. A rock
'n' roll band, and a defunct one at that, seems hardly the
place to find lessons in brand building and marketing.
Yet the Grateful Dead, over the course of a remarkable 30-year
run as a rock icon, employed a raft of nontraditional methods to
build a brand that endures and continues to grow more than four
years after the group disbanded. The 1995 death of Jerry Garcia,
the band's musical and spiritual leader, at the age of 53
marked the end of an era as well as of the band. But, if anything,
the brand has actually thrived and grown stronger since
Garcia's death, fueled by a broad and radical marketing plan by
Grateful Dead Productions, the band's longtime corporate
entity, and an insatiable desire on the part of Grateful Dead fans
for the band to live on.
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Because the lessons it offers are universal, as relevant to
selling perfume or cars as they are to marketing music, the
Grateful Dead is a radical marketer worthy of attention. The
Grateful Dead, through a series of both serendipitous circumstances
and conscious best-practice business decisions, built a model that
flew in the face of conventional music industry wisdom. What
emerged was a highly successful, easily recognizable brand with the
cachet of a Harley-Davidson and a vast following of fans known as
Deadheads, who were as devoted as a religious sect.
In many ways, the Dead is in an enviable position. A highly
profitable, debt-free, privately held 34-year-old company like
Grateful Dead Productions, still owned and run by the founders, is
unusual in today's dynamic business environment. This fiscal
serenity, along with the continuity of ownership and leadership,
provides a prognosis for the future that is remarkably upbeat.
Sam Hill, co-founder of Helios Consulting Group, has almost
20 years of experience working on marketing issues. Business
journalist Glenn Rifkin has written extensively for The New York
Times and contributes to many business publications.
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