“Dead”-On Business Rules: Ten Tie-Dyed and True Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, part 2 of 2
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.
[wcm_restrict]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.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]
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About the Authors
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 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.
Management and Leadership Best Practice 3 – Demonstrating Commitment
“In a bacon-and-egg breakfast, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed.”
Brian Billick
Head coach of the Baltimore Ravens (1999 to 2007)
Led the Ravens to a 34–7 victory over the New York Giants in Super Bowl XXXV
Buy-in, engagement, support… terms used to suggest commitment to a particular course of action, but are they really? What is true commitment?
By definition, commitment is an agreement or pledge to do something in the future; the state of being obligated or emotionally compelled. For the leader, commitment means so much more. True commitment is a deeply passionate drive where one dedicates all that they are, all that they possess, and all that they will be to the achievement of stated goal; making the individual’s commitment readily visible to all members of the organization.
So what are the observables of true commitment?
The leader who demonstrates commitment does so by:
- lending his or her political clout to sell and then advance the initiatives targeting achievement of the stated objective and eliminate those that would hinder progress
- providing financial support, including making cuts in areas the leader is less committed to in order to fund goal supporting activities
- assigning those personnel resources most capable of helping the organization realize its stated goal
- dedicating his or her time to the achievement of the stated goal, including the rescheduling of other less contributing events
- offering his or her personal time (nights, weekends, and holidays) to advance the initiatives supporting achievement of the desired objective
- behaving in a manner reflective of the long-term outcomes desired
When a leader demonstrates true commitment to a stated outcome, his or her followers will mirror that commitment; dedicating their energy, talent, and intellect to successfully completing objective supporting activities no matter how difficult they are. Leaders not demonstrating true commitment will fail to inspire followers; realizing a lackluster effort and subsequently placing the objective’s achievement in jeopardy.
StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective – Managing Health Insurance Plans
StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective podcasts examine the unnecessary marketplace uncertainty created by today’s headline events and the actions business leaders should take to ensure their organizations succeed under these circumstances.
In Managing Health Insurance Plans, we are joined by George Pantos, Executive Director of the Healthcare Performance Management Institute. George shares his thoughts on how companies can keep their current health plans in light of the recently passed healthcare legislation and under what circumstances they may wish to do so, including:
- under what circumstances company leaders would want to keep their organization’s existing health insurance plans
- what leaders must do to have their organization’s current health insurance plans grandfathered
- what a Healthcare Performance Management program is and how it can help companies keep their current healthcare insurance plans
- the costs and benefits associated with implementing a Healthcare Performance management program
- why some executives may want to eliminate their organization’s health insurance program altogether
Additional Information
In addition to the invaluable insights George shares in this StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective podcast are the resources accessible from his website, www.HPMInstitute.org. George can be reached at GPantos@HPMInstitute.org.
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About the Author
George Pantos is Executive Director of the Healthcare Performance Management Institute, a research and education organization dedicated to promoting the use of business technology and management principles that deliver better and more cost-effective healthcare benefits for employers who provide health insurance coverage for employees and their dependents. To read George’s full biography, click here.
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Leadership Inspirations – Great Vision
“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion.”
Jack Welch
Respected business leader and former Chairman and CEO of General Electric (1981 – 2001)
The Five Floors of Relationships
I know thousands of people, and many of them wield tremendous influence. If life and business were all about “who you know,” then I’d be set. But none of those relationships took on extraordinary value unless I approached them with the idea that they mattered for something above and beyond the transaction.
I think of relationships in terms of a five-floor building. The deeper and more meaningful a relationship, the higher the floor it resides on. My closest, deepest relationships are Fifth Floor or Penthouse, relationships.
Let me be clear – relationships seldom fit neatly into a box (or a building). They’re far too dynamic. Some overlap on different floors, and others seem to move up and down floors like an elevator. But the Five Floor plan helps give me a reference point and allows me to think about the boundaries that define my relationships, so that I can continually work to make them stronger and more rewarding. I try to develop strong relationships at every level. And because my relationships with others matter so much to me, and because I come to them intending to help others, many of these relationships develop into something more meaningful than anything I had imagined.
[wcm_restrict]Most relationships start on the First Floor. We meet and we greet. We exchange business cards. It typically involves a transactional exchange. We need something specific from the other person – an airline ticket, or lunch, or help with a question. After we get what we want, we move on.
We engage in dozens of First Floor relationships each day – with clients, colleagues, the postal clerk, the receptionist at the dentist’s office, the waitress at the restaurant, the flight attendant on the airplane.
This is where most relationships start. But all too often we allow our relationships to stay there. We meet the new hire in our department one morning and forget her name by lunch (if not before). If people aren’t essential to our jobs or our daily lives, we don’t make the effort to get to know them better. We only make a minimal investment of time and effort; the vendor on the phone who takes an order is a faceless voice.
The next level of relationships – Second Floor relationships – is where we begin sharing more information. But it’s very basic information, the type we dispense out of social obligation or because it’s a job requirement, not because we’re offering some insight into who we are.
Unfortunately, many of us have friends we think of as “close” who, in reality, are only on the Second Floor. We seldom reveal things to them about ourselves that would make us vulnerable or open; we seldom take emotional risks. If someone else mentions such an acquaintance, our instinct is to say, “Oh, I’m friends with so-and-so.” But when we really peel back the onion, all we have is an NSW (news, sports, weather) relationship. We would never count on them for help, or for a big favor.
In Third Floor relationships, people develop an emotional comfort level that goes beyond facts and information. Instead of resting on NSW conversations, we begin sharing opinions and feelings. It’s not uncommon to feel safe enough to exchange competing viewpoints, and not just on trivial matters like who was the best clutch hitter in the history of baseball.
In business, positional authority remains the primary guiding force in Third Floor relationships. Our position at work requires us to say what we think, rather than just present data, because our opinions can help shape decisions. The higher we move up the organizational chart, the more our opinions and concerns about issues matter.
Fifth Floor relationships – the Penthouse of relationships – go well beyond anything discussed in Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People. In Fifth Floor relationships, vulnerability, authenticity, trust, and loyalty are off the charts. They are relationships based on shared empathy—an intuitive understanding of each other’s needs, even those that aren’t necessarily expressed. We literally “feel” another person’s state of mind. It’s a relationship based more on giving than on getting. But that kind of giving gives us more than we could possibly imagine.
In Fifth Floor relationships, we become confidants, advisers, and partners in helping the other person achieve their greatest potential.
Yes, Fifth Floor relationships are uncommon, if for no other reason than the amount of time and energy required to develop and maintain such relationships. But our tendency is to put unnecessary limits on our Fifth Floor relationships. We may think we only have room for two or three such relationships, when in fact we can easily embrace a dozen or more. Or we think only certain types of people can relate to us on a Fifth Floor level.
All relationships require hard work, patience, understanding, and, yes, tactics and strategies designed to make them blossom. But don’t confuse that with manipulation. We can have tactics and strategies for building relationships, just as we have tactics and strategies for marketing, selling, advertising, production, distribution, and customer service.
The key to creating a rich network of relationships, however, is understanding this deep and basic truth: motives matter. If all we care about is using others to advance our career and our net worth, our relationship will have no lasting value. It may work for a time, or in a few specific situations, but the foundation on which you build your relationships will be unstable, and the relationship ultimately will collapse – likely when you need it most.
By building meaningful relationships, without sacrificing our integrity or treating other people as a means to an end, I’m convinced we not only can achieve our goals but move beyond them, personally and professionally.
This article is adapted from Tommy Spaulding’s new book It’s Not Just Who You Know
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About the Author
Tommy Spaulding is president of The Spaulding Companies LLC, a national leadership development, consulting, and speaking organization. Before starting his firm, he was the head of the international nonprofit, Up With People. Tommy is the founder of Leader’s Challenge, which has become the largest high school civic and leadership program in Colorado. He is the co-founder of The Center for Third Sector Excellence and the founder of the National Leadership Academy. Tommy also created Dialogue for Tomorrow, an annual international global leadership conference. He received a BA in Political Science from East Carolina University, an MBA from Bond University in Australia, and an MA in Non-Profit Management from Regis University. In 2007, Tommy received an Honorary PhD in Humanities from the Art Institute of Colorado. To read Tommy’s complete biography, click here.