Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: Musical Masters of Building With Their Community

Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead by David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan

Though I think the off-kilter cover art above for Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead is simply slackness on the part of some wack employee at Wiley, one could imagine that it indicates the Grateful Dead's somewhat skewed version of reality in the eyes of mainstream America, though that ultimately changed as they helped alter American culture.

[Update: I've been told by the authors that the off-center nature of the poster image is intended to look like it was a real life poster posted somewhere.  As I note in the comments, that doesn't work because it's on a white background so the context they're trying to evoke is absent.  It may work on a book cover, but I think you really need a bit of background to show that it's a flyer posted over other flyers or something similar that evokes a context to make that work.  It certainly doesn't work on the web with a white background surrounded by perfectly rectangular forms.  I haven't seen the book so I can't speak to the experience of seeing the cover in the context of a physical environment.]

In any case, David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan present their look at the Grateful Dead's success as the "Most Compelling Case Study in the History of Social Media and Inbound Marketing". If you ever went to a Dead show or got a sense of how the scene operated, you probably understand where the authors are coming from. Some of the concepts they present include (from the press release):

Rethink traditional industry assumptions
Rather than focus on record albums as a primary revenue source (with touring to support album sales), the Dead created a business model focused on touring. Halligan and Scott apply that idea to today’s Internet – where the cost of distribution of electronic information is zero. Now, entire new opportunities emerge for those willing to challenge established business models. The Grateful Dead teaches us that business model innovation is frequently more important than product innovation.

Turn your customers into evangelists
Unlike nearly every other band, the Grateful Dead not only encouraged concertgoers to record their live shows, they actually established "taper sections" where fans' equipment could be set up for the best sound quality. When nearly every other band said "no" the Grateful Dead created a huge network of people who traded tapes in pre-Internet days. The broad exposure led to millions of new fans and sold tickets to the live shows. Today, as many companies experiment with offering valuable content on the Web, the Grateful Dead teaches us that when we free our content, more people hear about our company and eventually do business with us.

Bypass accepted channels and go direct
The Grateful Dead created a mailing list in the early 1970s where they announced tours to fans first. Later, they established their own ticketing office, providing the most loyal fans with the best seats in the house. The Grateful Dead teaches us that building a community and treating customers with care and respect drives passionate loyalty.

Build a huge, loyal following
The Grateful Dead let their audience define the Grateful Dead experience. Concerts were a happening, a destination where all 20,000 or more audience members were actually part of the experience. Making fans an equal partner in a mutual journey, the Grateful Dead teaches us that our community defines who we are. In an era of instant communications on Twitter, blogs and the like, we learn that companies cannot force a mindset on their customers.

Their point about the Grateful Dead's willingness to work with their fans who taped live shows is an important one. Deadheads from back in the day will tell you just how cool that could get with all sorts of stories about sneaking equipment into coliseums who banned tapers even for Dead shows and then, once inside, having free reign to tape. There have been occasions where the sound people let someone plug right into the system. And those tapes got passed around (and still are) and now are much more readily available online but, basically, they were the bread and water of the movement, keeping people connected and wanting to see more shows.

This wouldn't work with other bands so easily because the Dead's repertoire was huge (I keep saying and will continue to say was because everything changed after Jerry Garcia, no disrespect intended to the rest of the group, but that's how it is) and involved a great deal of improvisation so that different versions of songs could vary much more widely than one typically encounters from other bands.

But I think I'm correct in saying that the Dead did not initially support tapers based on what I was told by a Deadhead that was pretty deep in the game. I could be wrong but I think it's comparable to the way that Twitter users have created many innovations on Twitter that the company has since made official, like the use of hashtags and so forth, but that was a community move which the companies (Dead & Twitter) were smart enough to follow.

You should note that the text above from the authors tends to phrase things as if the Dead created the community.  Many Deadheads will tell you that, though the musicians were in charge of the music, the community actually created many key aspects of the Grateful Dead phenomenon.  But that's still pretty tough for folks to wrap their heads around for some reason.

Should be a very interesting book that, if it's as good as the authors claim, will help enable marketers to remember that humans have always been social and that the web has simply enabled certain aspects of that sociability in a manner that also facilitates marketers accessing communities with modes other than advertising.

Bonus Bumper Sticker:
Who Are The Grateful Dead?
And Why Do They Keep Following Me?

Available on Amazon:
Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead

Over at Hip Hop Press:
Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead by David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan