CHAPTER 3

Build a Diverse Team

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.

 

Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist, also played bluegrass banjo, an influence that added to the Dead’s category-defying sound. In fact, Garcia participated in numerous bluegrass side projects throughout his lifetime including his excellent band “Old and In the Way.” You can hear this influence in Grateful Dead cuts such as “Ripple” and “Friend of the Devil.”

 

Bassist Phil Lesh, on the other hand, began his career as a classical jazz musician who played trumpet; he learned bass guitar “on the job” after joining the Grateful Dead early on. Because he didn’t know how to play bass, he didn’t bring preconceived notions to the job. His willingness to experiment and learn resulted in his playing a significant role in defining the Grateful Dead’s distinctive sound—and ultimately becoming one of music’s most influential bass players.

 

Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the Grateful Dead’s first keyboard player, the son of an R&B disc jockey, was a blues harmonica player and also a keyboardist before he joined the band. His background added yet another twist to the Grateful Dead’s unique sound.

THE GRATEFUL DEAD COMBINED DIVERSE SKILLS FOR A SYNERGISTIC 1 + 1 = 3 SOUND THAT HAD NEVER BEEN HEARD BEFORE.

 

When bands form, they’re typically made up of people with similar musical backgrounds. And if a member dies or leaves the group, the band will hold auditions to ensure that the replacement can easily fit in with the band’s sound.

 

The Grateful Dead, on the other hand, seemed to attract musicians with widely diverse backgrounds. Keith Godchaux joined the band after his wife grabbed Garcia at a show to say her husband would make a perfect keyboardist for the band (McKernan having stepped down due to ill health); although Godchaux had not studied the Grateful Dead or their music and was primarily an acoustic piano player, he tried out—and was immediately signed on.

 

In addition to having musicians with diverse backgrounds, the Grateful Dead often had musicians with very little experience and even less formal education. Guitarist and singer Bob Weir was a high school student when he founded the Grateful Dead with Jerry Garcia. The mix of unique backgrounds unencumbered by conventional wisdom proved to be a powerful combination.

MARKETING LESSON FROM THE GRATEFUL DEAD

Build a Diverse Team

In today’s world things are changing fast, so, like the Grateful Dead, you need a marketing team comprised of individuals with diverse, unique talents that didn’t necessarily originate in a marketing department, PR firm, or ad agency. You need people who are “digital citizens” (think bluegrass background) hardwired for the Web. In other words, you want people who instinctively understand how the Web works or at least know the right questions to ask.

 

To build a great marketing team, you need highly analytical types (think jazz background) who speak the language of spreadsheets as well as their native tongue. In a perfect world, you would have folks on your team with deep reach (think blues background) into the marketplace. Traditionally, people with “reach” had Rolodexes stuffed with hundreds of industry contacts. Now you need people whose reach includes thousands in the blogosphere and social mediasphere. Finally, you need people who are facile with creating content (think R&B background): white papers, blogs, videos, e-books, webinars, and podcasts. You won’t find all of these traits in one person, so you should build a team of people who hold these various skills.

 

When hiring the individuals with these skills, you’ll want to consider people who don’t come from traditional marketing, advertising, or PR backgrounds and are completely unencumbered by the “best practices” developed during an era when your marketplace watched ads, answered cold calls, opened e-mail blasts, and attended trade shows. For example, there are lots of out-of-work journalists out there who would make great content creators. A freshly minted MBA who understands pivot tables might make a great analytical hire. Someone tweeting their brains out in your support department might have great “reach” for you. A blogger in your industry who is living in her parent’s basement because she cannot figure out how to monetize her content might make a perfect content creator.

 

If you look at most marketing job descriptions today, you’ll see that most companies are still mired in old ways, even though the behaviors of their target market have totally changed: “Write and maintain print and online sales collateral, including web site,” “Support PR activities,” and so forth. Use this fact to your advantage and jump ahead of your marketplace to build a diverse team with unique talents that can help you match the way you market to the way your marketplace shops and buys! What you don’t want to do in today’s world is to hire a lot of marketing generalists with heavily overlapping skill sets in “project management.”

THE GRATEFUL DEAD TEACHES US TO FIND TALENTED PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF OUR INDUSTRY AND COMFORT ZONES.

DIGITAL DIVA JULIA ROY BRINGS SOCIAL SKILLS TO COACH

It used to be that to find out what was new and hot in the world of fashion, you had to buy glossy, richly illustrated magazines stuffed full of ads or tune in to a TV show highlighting the lives of the rich and famous. Luxury brands carefully monitored their brands as overexposure opened them to the masses—diluting their image of exclusivity. For this reason luxury brands have been hesitant to embrace social media. The Internet is for the masses, the thinking goes, and therefore social media opens the brand to everyone.

 

Yet like most people these days, affluent shoppers have moved online for the sake of convenience, and luxury brands need to keep up. One way to do that is by hiring someone like Julia Roy—which is what luxury handbag maker Coach did when the company brought her on board in 2009. Roy is from completely outside the fashion industry, but she’s a digital citizen, she’s analytical and has broad reach, and she’s a natural-born content creator.

 

Roy doesn’t have a traditional corporate marketing or PR background or an MBA. After completing her degree in International Relations, Public Policy, and Political Science at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, Roy realized that she didn’t want a career in political science and fell into working on a fundraising campaign called “Making Change for Katrina,” where she developed a web site and blog—and made a life-changing discovery: The two-week old “Making Change” blog ranked higher in the search engines than the more established web site did. Roy asked, “How could this poorly designed and makeshift blog be considered by Google to have more ‘authority’ than the web site?!” She set out to find out why.

 

So began her odyssey into social media and emerging digital communities. Along the way, she amassed a following through her own personal branding strategies, including over 40,000 Twitter followers and 3,000 Facebook fans.

 

And that job at Coach? Roy is now the Senior Manager of New Media of the company’s nascent Global Web and Digital Media department and is helping the luxury retailer incorporate social media tactics. In this case, Coach did the exact right thing by bringing in someone from completely outside their industry, who was unencumbered by an older set of assumptions and who had a skill-set that was likely completely different from their existing marketing staff.

ROCK ON

Rethink your marketing department

Does your marketing team look like everyone else’s? Is your marketing organization set up the same way as that of your last company? Is your marketing organization full of “generalist project manager” types who have heavily overlapping skill-sets? If so, it’s time for a change in organization, some new skills development, and new blood (i.e., Julia Roy-style).

 

ACTION: 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.

 

Try to diversify the skill-set in your marketing department and fill in the gaps by hiring or training folks to be digital citizens (“convert team”), who are highly analytical (“analyze team”), have deep market reach (“get found team”) and/or are natural-born content creators (“get found team”).

 

Look outside your marketing department (inside your company) and look outside the marketing industry (outside your company) to fill in talent gaps.