Introduction
“THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A GRATEFUL DEAD CONCERT”
First used in the liner notes of the Grateful Dead album Europe ’72.
Picture a summer evening, and imagine that you are in a sold-out arena. The audience members have been partying all afternoon in the hot sunshine, hanging with old friends, meeting new ones, drinking, laughing, smoking. . . .
The collective anticipation in the arena feels positively electric, enhanced by the sounds from the stage, which hums with tens of thousands of watts of pure power ready to rock. The house lights go down and a cheer goes up. Hundreds of tiny red lights on the band’s onstage equipment are visible, blinking on and off like fireflies as the musicians shuffle onto the stage.
Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, and Jerry Garcia plug in and noodle around a bit on their guitars, their backs to the audience. The two drummers settle in behind their kits. One sends out a cosmic boom from a bass drum, and we in the audience feel it as much as we hear it. A cheer for the boom! Some people try to discern what song the band will open with, based on the quasi-riffs now being played. Set-list savants predict the opener to their friends, based on the algorithms they used that morning to query databases of every song ever played by the band. Then quietly, slowly at first, the band coalesces around a familiar tune. They turn to face the crowd. The lights come up. The volume is cranked. And 20,000 people collectively begin to boogie. Another Grateful Dead concert has left the station.
The Grateful Dead emerged out of San Francisco in 1965, during an exceptional period in American history. The Vietnam War was escalating and the civil rights movement was in full swing. Young people were beginning to question authority in large numbers, and the counterculture scene was growing. The band grew in popularity during the late 1960s, releasing their first album in 1967 and playing Woodstock in 1969. But unlike many other bands that faded away or broke up, the Grateful Dead played on into the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, with band members continuing to play together today, gaining new fans along the way, including us.
We decided to take our fandom to a new level and write about the Grateful Dead. However, we’re certainly not the first people to identify the Grateful Dead as a band worthy of study. In the past few years, a wave of interest in the band has emerged in a wide variety of fields.
A conference at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst called “Unbroken Chain: The Grateful Dead in Music, Culture and Memory” brought together scholars, fans, artists, performers and members of the extended Grateful Dead family for the first major university conference on the enduring legacy of the Grateful Dead experience. The conference included more than 50 presenters in 20 panel discussions ranging from music composition and improvisation to an examination of the band’s business model. There were musical performances, gallery exhibits, and presentations; and the conference served to legitimize the study of the band. Brian attended the conference and it got his mind spinning about the possibilities of the band as a marketing example.
Then in 2009, the University of California at Santa Cruz acquired the Grateful Dead archive, considered one of the most significant collections of twentieth century American popular culture. The archive includes 600,000 linear feet of books, recordings, business correspondence, posters, tickets, photographs, films, stage props, and more. The acquisition prompted excitement from scholars in many disciplines eager to gain inside knowledge for their work in sociology, history, art, musicology, and business theory—both within and beyond the Grateful Dead community.
In March 2010, the New York Historical Society opened the first large-scale exhibition of materials from the Grateful Dead Archive. “Grateful Dead: Now Playing at the New York Historical Society” chronicled the history of the band, its music, and the phenomenal longevity of the Grateful Dead community through original art and documents related to the band, its members, performances, and productions. We were both thrilled to participate in a private tour of the exhibition led by Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann. The exhibit, which ran through July 2010, explored, in part, the band’s refusal to follow established music industry rules.
It is this marketing savvy, including direct contact with fans, a focus on touring, and other innovations that we profile in detail within these pages.
So, why all the fuss?
Well, the Grateful Dead played over 2,300 live concerts from 1965 to 1995, establishing the band as the most popular touring act in rock history. While the band also saw success with 13 studio albums, it was the live concert experience that set them apart. The Grateful Dead created a free-form live sound that combined elements of many different musical styles (rock, country-western, improvisational jazz, gospel, and more) to create a completely new and unique sound. The band played about 500 songs live over a 30-year career, and of those 150 were original compositions. The band covered songs from such diverse artists as Bob Dylan (“All Along the Watchtower”), Kris Kristofferson (“Me and Bobby McGee”), Johnny Cash (“Big River”), Steve Winwood (“Dear Mr. Fantasy”), Chuck Berry (“Johnny B. Goode”), and The Beatles (“Day Tripper”). Unlike most rock acts that played the same songs in the same order every show, you never knew what Grateful Dead you would get in a given night, and that surprise element was part of the Grateful Dead experience.
A Grateful Dead concert was more than just . . . well . . . a concert. It was a happening, a destination, and, for the most diehard fans, it was their lives. Indeed, some people followed the band from city to city, attending each of the roughly 100 shows that they played in a typical year. Many supported themselves by selling goods—food, drink, drugs, or Grateful Dead-themed merchandise—in the parking lot “scene” at each venue.
Grateful Dead shows were a place where people bonded. The traveling caravan was a true community—a collaboration between the fans and the band—providing “Deadheads” with a sense of belonging (as well as some damned fine music). The concert experience was a counterculture adventure and many people treated the shows as a pilgrimage. Inside the arenas 20,000 fans would come together as one organism, bonding in a way not unlike that seen in a religious movement.
MARKETING LESSONS
In the 1960s the Grateful Dead pioneered many social media and inbound marketing concepts that businesses across all industries use today. The band made a series of difficult and often unpopular decisions in order to differentiate themselves from their competition by providing the highest quality service to their fans. They were not simply selling a product. The Dead pioneered a “freemium” business model, allowing concert attendees to record and trade concert tapes, building a powerful word-of-mouth fan network powered by free music. 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 its era and inventing a brand that democratically included their consumers (and literally cocreated a lifestyle for Deadheads).
We’re eager to write about the Grateful Dead because we’ve identified many lessons in what the band has been doing over more than 40 years that can be applied today. These lessons are an important tool for helping to understand the new marketing environment in a language and with examples that are familiar to all. The Grateful Dead is one huge case study in contrarian marketing. Most of the band’s many marketing innovations are based on doing the exact opposite of what other bands (and record labels) are doing at the time. Here are just a few examples of what you’ll learn in these pages:
1.
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. Now, entirely 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.
2.
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.
3.
Bypass accepted channels and go direct In the early 1970’s The Grateful Dead were one of the first bands to create a mailing list 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.
4.
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.
Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead will show you how to think and market like the band, which is to think and market differently from your competition. Each chapter presents and analyzes a marketing concept practiced by the Dead and provides a real-world example of a company employing that concept today. We also include a “Rock On” section at the end of each chapter with “to-do” ideas for you.
OUR LONG STRANGE TRIPS
David first heard the band’s music just before he started high school. His next-door neighbor, a college student, played Grateful Dead music, loudly, from his bedroom window all summer. The music grew on him and he saw his first live concert on January 17, 1979, in New Haven, Connecticut. He was hooked for life, collecting live concert tapes and seeing the band another 41 times. Brian was in high school when he was indoctrinated into the band by his friend, who blasted the Grateful Dead while they painted houses on Cape Cod during the summer. Brian hitchhiked to his first concert in Saratoga Springs, New York, and that concert sparked a lifelong love—he’s seen over 100 shows since.
We first met in 2007 after Brian had read David’s book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and invited David to the HubSpot offices to talk modern marketing. We both saw the amazing potential of Web marketing and had focused our businesses in the emerging area. When Brian saw a Grateful Dead sticker on David’s notebook computer, we also bonded as Deadheads. When you’ve shared the common experience of having seen dozens of Grateful Dead shows, there is an instant kinship. And, perhaps most importantly, we were both lifelong Grateful Dead fans. Our bond was cemented when, a few weeks later, David had a spare ticket to a sold-out Phil Lesh & Friends show (Lesh is the Grateful Dead’s bassist) and he sent it to Brian, who until then was ticketless.
Not only had we both been going to concerts for years, we had both been inspired by the great marketing examples set by The Grateful Dead. In each of David’s previous five books, there is a reference to the band, and most speeches he’s delivered since 2007 include riffs on how the Grateful Dead culture of “losing control” benefits organizations of all kinds. At HubSpot, the market position that Brian built for his company around the new category of “Inbound Marketing” was significantly influenced by how the Grateful Dead created its own music category (they watched “competitors,” but never followed them).
In March 2010 we collaborated on a free webinar called “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.” We quietly announced the virtual gig and were amazed when 1,700 people signed up with almost no promotion. So on April Fools’ Day, taking a page out of the Grateful Dead concert playbook, we improvised a discussion on the band’s marketing and what companies can learn from it. The feedback from over 300 tweets and a bunch of blog posts was so overwhelmingly positive, we knew we had to do more. This book was born.
PLAYING IN THE BAND
We’ve organized the book into short, snappy chapters, each focused on one element of the Grateful Dead’s marketing. We explain how the band pioneered a technique, provide details, and then give a modern example of an organization using the strategy today. Although we’ve grouped the chapters into sections, we’ve written them as stand-alone units that you should feel free to read in any order. (After all, the Grateful Dead hated authority and encouraged independent behavior in fans, so who are we to tell you how to read this book!)
Throughout these pages, you’ll be treated to remarkable photographs from Jay Blakesberg, a San Francisco-based photographer whose work has appeared on hundreds of covers and in feature articles for numerous magazines, including Rolling Stone, Guitar World, and Guitar Player. Blakesberg began photographing the Grateful Dead as a high-school student in 1978 and joined the traveling caravan that followed the band in the 1980s. In later years, he worked closely with the band and was given access to create much more intimate and exclusive images.
The amazing original illustrations in the book are by Richard Biffle, an artist whose mystical fantasy pieces inspire many minds. For more than 20 years, Biffle has been working with the Grateful Dead (as well as the individual band members and their spinoff projects), creating the fantastic artwork seen on Dead posters, merchandise, and CD covers.
A note about our use of the band’s name: With the 1995 death of founding member and spiritual leader Jerry Garcia, the band’s name—the Grateful Dead—was retired when referring to live concerts. While the name continued to be used for the sales of recordings and merchandise, the Grateful Dead would never play again, and musicians from the band pursued solo careers. From 1998 to 2002, surviving members occasionally re-formed and toured under the name The Other Ones. In 2003, The Other Ones changed their name to The Dead, and then in 2009 a smaller offshoot called Furthur was formed. For simplicity, throughout the book we refer to the Grateful Dead in present tense, choosing not to draw a distinction between touring band names over the past 15 years, and instead treating the Grateful Dead as a band with a continuous 45-year history. The music never stopped.
We’ve enjoyed working on this book because it combines our personal friendship, our love for the Grateful Dead, and our intense interest in marketing into one focused project.
We hope that our 50 combined years of intense interest in the Grateful Dead together with decades of marketing experience has created a book that’s valuable to both Grateful Dead fans and marketers alike.
