You can view it as an accidental by-product of stubbornly wanting to do things their own way but the Grateful Dead business model, which coexisted with the artistic ambitions of the group, was revolutionary. It also was prescient given a present-day world where creativity and social media must unite and evolve in order for commercial achievements to originate and flourish.
Following a successful webinar made by David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan, the two longtime Deadheads and successful business writer and speaker (Scott) and website entrepreneur (Halligan) quickly developed the group’s core approaches into an easy-to-read book that includes photographs by Jay Blakesberg and illustrations by Richard Biffle. Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History focuses on the intersection of these creative and commercial sides.
In talking to Scott it’s clear that he’s committed to the ideas of using communication to unite business and customers in ways that are beneficial to both parties as much as he is to the music of the Grateful Dead and its numerous post-Jerry offshoots (he is on the advisory board for the University of California Santa Cruz Grateful Dead Archives). He also spoke enthusiastically about 7 Walkers and having tickets to the three-night Furthur run in Boston as well as bringing his wife and teenage daughter to shows over the past few years.
Our talk occurred during a break from his work writing the 3rd edition of his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly.
JPG: At what point did these marketing lessons come to you before you even created the webinar?
DMS: Brian and I have been fans for a long time. I saw my first show in 1979 when I was in high school. Brian soon thereafter, he’s a little younger than I am. We’ve both been marketing and business people for our careers. I was thinking about some of the analogies for a long time, many years, particularly when I started to write and speak about the new world of online marketing and social media marketing where giving away stuff away for free works great, where you give away a free video or a free white paper or ebook or something on the web. It’s just great marketing. I just drew the parallel between what I was seeing in my writing and speaking career and what the Dead was doing back in the day. Brian also was thinking various things as well separately too me. This is well before the webinar.
When we decided to do a book, right off the top of our heads without even thinking about it, we had more than half of the content already mapped out. And then just giving it a little bit more thought the other ones came to us. It was also good to have a co-author. Brian and I agree that we don’t think either one of us could have written it by ourselves. It took a couple of different perspectives on it to be able to come together.
JPG: Looking at it, it seems like two long couple pots of coffee sessions just to come up with it.
DMS: Exactly. And that was a part of it. We met in person…a dozen of times over the course of the time we were writing and a lot of was just that. We’d just banter ideas back and forth. Although we don’t indicate who, our writing style was that we each did the first draft of half of the chapters in the book and then the other one would edit each other’s work. And that worked out great, too, because we came at it from slightly different perspectives. That was also kind of like a tennis match because we were writing really quickly. It was written over six weeks. ‘I just did a chapter, check it out.’ And he goes, ‘I finished one, too. Check mine out.’ That was really fun.
JPG: In that method of going through each other’s work were you able to give it one Voice or was that done through the publisher’s editor?
DMS: We had to do that. That was really important to us. We relied on Wiley (the book’s publisher) to help us there because all writers little tics of words that we use. So, we tried our best to make sure that it was smooth throughout the whole thing.
My wife is translating the book into Japanese. It’s coming out in the Japanese language in about three months, being put out by Nikkei BP, one of the largest publishing houses in Japan. And my wife is Japanese so she’s working on the translation. As she was really digging in, heavy into the book I asked her, ‘Which chapters did you think I wrote?’ And she said, ‘There’s no question you wrote this one, this one and this one and Brian wrote this one and this one but I’m not really sure these ones.’ Most of the time she was wrong. So, we smoothed it out pretty well.
JPG: Overall, the reaction to the book has it been embraced by the business community, overriding any stigma of the band and the audience that was there?
DMS: Oh, amazingly well. In fact, a lot of people have told us in private emails or some of the blog posts we’ve seen and even some of the Amazon.com reviews people have started their comments with, ‘I never really liked the Grateful Dead…’ One of the blog posts I love was, ‘What can the business world learn from a bunch of dirty hippies?’ (laughs) So, what we found was that people who were initially skeptical because they weren’t fans of the band or they didn’t know that much about the lifestyle were converted when they read the book. Because it’s short people are willing to take a chance. A lot of people tell me that they read these books on airplanes if they travel for business by plane or trains if they commute by train. We designed it to be a one airplane read. If you’re going from coast-to-coast you can easily finish the book, probably read it twice. So, people are willing to take a chance on it, where they may not be willing to take a chance if it’s a much longer book. The other thing that came up that was really interesting was that there were a number of people who were a little bit reluctant or resistant because of the drug culture image. They would be like, ‘Oh, I don’t know…LSD and drugs and hippies and all that…’ And they came away thinking, ‘Wow! There’s a lot of really interesting stuff going on here. So, they were able to get over that initial trepidation around their stereotype of what the drug culture meant.
JPG: In regards to the band. When you put it altogether in the book it looks like a great model of art meets commerce or do you see it when you put everything in perspective as an offshoot of the Beatnik ways, life perspective, hippie movement, good timing and real cosmic accident in the past that we are able to learn from in the present?
DMS: I think it’s a little bit of both. We’ve had interactions with band members. We’ve had interactions with members of their management team and with their record label, Rhino, and people around the band, and what often comes up is a little bit of a smirk, ‘We’re not marketers. What are you talking about, man. We’re making this stuff up as we’re going along.’ While that’s true, a certain aspect of it was not planned. It’s not like they sat down and said, ‘I bet if we allow tapers to come in 10 years later we’ll be selling a lot more concert tickets.’ It wasn’t that kind of pre-planned approach. What also came out in all of those conversations, whether they were with band members or members of their current management team – we didn’t speak with anyone from the former management team, so I’m talking about people working with Phil and Bobby and Mickey and so on – it was, ‘You know what? We just did the right thing. Whenever the decision was between money to us and what was right for the fans, we would come down with what was right for the fans. More often than not, the money took care of itself when we took care of the fans.’
A lot of it is this sort of hippie culture, let’s be nice to people and why not give stuff away and make people happy and all that but in the end that’s what drove the success. And our whole thing in the book is every business can learn from that. If you’re doing bad and you’re trying to gouge people and you’re offering shoddy products and you’re being secretive and you’re not providing value, you’re ultimately not going to be successful.
JPG: In the context of the book, do you think it was a business hiccup or overall did it make sense when archive.org was instructed to pull any of the Dead’s soundboard recordings and it generated a lot of controversy?
DMS: …Yeah…yeah…you know, we didn’t approach too much post-1995. We didn’t think of this concept until recently and we didn’t have any of the interactions with folks until recently. So, we’re kind of looking to the past. But, I think just some of the modern things, offering the Europe ’72 box set. That’s classic Grateful Dead marketing. The classic Grateful Dead marketing is give away…let tapers into the shows and people can get those Europe ’72 shows one way or another on the web yet people are willing to pay $450 for the deluxe set. To us that’s classic. The other thing is we talked about embracing technology and the Wall of Sound, and how they always had great sound systems. On the 2009 Dead tour they did an iPhone application. Again, classic Grateful Dead. One of the very first bands, I think, that did an iPhone application. Although, I haven’t verified that but certainly one of the first. Even though they started in 1965, all the way out to 2009 when the surviving members get together to play a series of gigs and they’re still out innovating with technology.
JPG: The first portion of your answer references to the chapter on Upgrade to Premium.
DMS: Exactly. It’s like why in the world would somebody pay $450 for something that they can get for nearly the same quality for free. Well, they want it because it is better and it’s got great packaging. It makes you a part of something. And it’s a limited edition. There’s only 7,200 copies. There’s lots and lots of reasons.
JPG: I don’t recall it being covered in the book but the period in the ‘70s when the Dead ran their own record label. Would that be a part of a don’t-be-afraid-to-fail mentality?
DMS: I think part of it was don’t be afraid to fail, but the underlying value seemed to us to always do what’s right for the fans. When they did their own label I think that was a big part of it. ‘We can distribute in a different way. We can have more control over what we’re going to do than those record label people.’ For a variety of reasons it didn’t necessarily work out. But, good for them for trying, right? For wanting to create both the art and the product manifestation of the art in a way that they felt was better for people buying those products.
JPG: When doing the book did you give or any thoughts of doing a sequel…
DMS: We didn’t think at all about doing a sequel. We just wanted to get this out. Brian and I have written a number of other books. So, we’re both writing other stuff. We’ve given thought to what else could come, and we threw out ideas like, ‘Could we think of another band?’
JPG: That’s what I was getting to, if you can think of another band that’s picked up that mantle…
DMS: The answer is ‘No.’ We’re not planning one. We haven’t done anything other than ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if…?’ type of thing.
JPG: But do you see some that have.
DMS: I think if we were to do another one I think we’d do a modern band, Radiohead or somebody like that who’s operating today. What was so cool about the Grateful Dead was the 30-year run from ’65 to ‘95. We approached everything post-Jerry just a little bit different. Doing another older band, I’m not sure I could get into doing that. I wouldn’t even be able to identify somebody that we could draw some business lessons from. When I think about some of the bands, Nine Inch Nails is another good example who have done really interesting things using modern technology, using streaming video, providing audio for free, pay what you want for the music, we’re not even gonna go through a label this time. Crowd-sourced videos like Radiohead did. There’s a lot of really interesting things out there. So, if we were to do it, we would do it on a modern band but there’s no plans whatsoever to do that.
JPG: Do you think other bands such as Phish, Widespread Panic or even Pearl Jam, it’s already been covered by this book?
DMS: There’s a lot to be said with that. I don’t think that Phish thinks that they’re following in the footsteps of the Grateful Dead, necessarily. I wouldn’t know. I’m just saying…but they do a lot of Grateful Dead style marketing things and they also do a lot of things that are very unique to them but in my opinion that wouldn’t be as interesting a book because the band’s music is pretty similar. I would want to do something that was quite a bit different, which is why I’m thinking of…even Lady Gaga, what in the world is she doing to become popular? (slight laugh) Something’s going on there. I don’t know what it is but something’s going on there.
JPG: Early on you mentioned free content. As far as spreading content, what do you think of sites where you have to register? Do you feel that’s putting up a barrier?
DMS: I think that’s putting up a huge barrier. My research suggests that between 20 to 1 and 50 to 1 ratio between those who will register and those who would prefer not to register. We’ll talk about a content unrelated to music for a second, like white papers in the business world. A lot of businesses put out free reports or white papers or ebooks or whatever they’re called to provide valuable information for the people that they might want to reach as potential customers. What most of them are doing is requiring that they register with an email address. The theory becomes that then they can have their sales people follow up. Well, the truth is that people are on to that game. They know exactly why you have to submit an email address and phone number to register for a piece of content, and they simply don’t want to be called by a sales person. For that reason if you have 100 people download a white paper with registration, without registration you would have between 2,000 to 5,000 who downloaded it. So, the Grateful Dead style is to not force people to register. Now there might be reasons why they could voluntarily register to, maybe, be alerted when a piece of content becomes available, that sort of thing. Literally, it’s a form of payment. Giving your email address is a form of payment. What the Grateful Dead was they had a gift system, ‘We will give you this. It’s free, the ability to tape a show. You don’t have to register to tape a show. If you want to, we’ll give you a taper seat but you don’t have to register to tape a show.’
JPG: Marketing Lessons is geared towards business but tell me how these things can be applied towards graduating college students or someone looking for a job in this economy?
DMS: It’s completely applicable to the job search. What most people do when they want to find a job, if they are just graduating from university or they’re in between roles or whatever it is, what they tend to do is two main things. Number one, they write a resume and number two, try and convince their network to pass that resume on to other people. That’s kind of an advertising approach to marketing yourself. It’s treating yourself like a ham sandwich. ‘Here’s my ham sandwich, please buy it.’ Whereas, what the Grateful Dead ideas would teach and what works so well for so many people that I know is if you’re creating great content on the web — you’re writing a blog, you’ve got a twitter feed, you’re creating some interesting videos — in the area that you eventually want to work if you’re a university student or if you’re in the job world already in the area of your expertise. That is a place that then you can leverage to get people to find you. In fact, my co-author, Brian Halligan, is the CEO of HubSpot. I think he’s got just over 200 employees now. And that’s how they find employees. Basically, you’re not gonna get hired at HubSpot unless you’re creating content, unless you’re writing a blog or got a video or doing something on twitter or all three is even better because that’s how they learn about you. They don’t even accept resumes. Then, you’re also set up for when a company comes looking. It’s both ways. A company might say, ‘I ought to find somebody in the Chicago area who is an expert in information technology at a media company,’ and, bang, if you write an information technology blog in the media business, you’re the first person they contact.
JPG: Interesting. Switching gears here, are you still on the advisory board..?
DMS: Yes, Brian and I are both on the advisory board of the Grateful Dead Archives and we donated 25% of the royalties of the book to the archive as well.
JPG: I was wondering if being on the advisory board, you can go in there at any time and play Mickey’s hand drum or…
DMS: (laughs) I really, really, really want to hold one of Jerry Garcia’s guitars. Brian has actually been to the archive in Santa Cruz. I have yet to be out to Santa Cruz but we went to New York when they had some of the items at the New York Historical Society (“The Grateful Dead: Now Playing at the New-York Historical Society” ran from March 5 to Sept. 5, 2010). That was pretty cool. We ended up having Billy Kreutzmann gave us a tour of that, which was really cool. Had him point at the different things and tell us about them for about an hour.
What it really means is that the archive is going through a process of digitizing a lot of the materials in the archive and making them available so that anybody can go online and look at them. And part of that requires money. It’s expensive to do that. So, they’re in the process of raising funds to be able to do that because the band gave the materials but they didn’t give funds to do all the things they need to do. There’s a lot of Grateful Dead fans who are now in a financial position because they are far enough into their careers to be actually donating serious money to an archive, but the challenge is getting the word out. Since we’re marketing guys, we’re actually an interesting group of people to have as part of their advisory board because we can provide ideas for how they can create a better website, how they can do interesting things with the digitized content and to be able to eventually attract more donors to be able to fund all the good works that they want to do.
JPG: You answered what would have been my next question which dealt with whether it as going to be an exhibit at some point or just be all online.
DMS: Well, I can’t speak for the archive. It might be a good interview at some point for you to do. They are planning on showing various things at various times. They had the New York Historical Society thing that ran. I think there’s some things that they actually show at University of California Santa Cruz, but one of the main things that they’re really excited about is being able to digitize all the content so that scholars and fans…and by the way it’s not just Grateful Dead content that’s interesting to anyone who wants to learn about the 1960s, wants to learn about San Francisco, wants to learn about touring, wants to learn about the music business, wants to learn about musicology. There’s lots of different categories of study and interest that the archive will have incredibly valuable information for people to look through. And they’ve got — I might get this wrong — but I think it’s 300 linear feet of stuff and I’m talking about stacked like a phone book. That’s a lot of material. That’s a football field of material. Imagine if it was laid end to end it would probably go from here to the moon. So, imagine trying to digitize all that.
