the grateful dead

Authenticity is a word almost no one associates with digital marketing—and fewer would connect marketing with eccentricity. Rather, no one did until 10 years ago, when two masters of the field—author David Meerman Scott and Hubspot founder Brian Halligan—co-authored Marketing Lessons From The Grateful Dead. The authors’ argument, laid out over dozens of well-supported lessons culled from the Dead’s wildly unconventional, fan-first approach to business, basically highlighted two things: the band’s single-focus fidelity to making the particular music they wanted to, and their devotion to the people who loved them for it. According to Scott and Halligan, that’s brilliant marketing. Ten years later, this unlikely book is still in print and the Dead, at least from a branding standpoint, have never been more alive. Just ask LeBron James, who recently wore a Dead-inspired Dancing Bear ensemble in the NBA bubble. Or Nike, whose Dancing Bear sneakers sell for top dollar. Or Old Navy who recently hopped on the tour bus with a brand of Steal Your Face tees for newbie Deadheads. We spoke to Scott about the legacy of his book, the longevity of his favorite band, and modern marketing lessons from that 55-year old rock band whose leader died more than 25 years ago.

wHO IS david?

Age: 59

Met co-author and Hubspot founder and CEO Brian Halligan when Halligan invited him to the Hubspot offices to talk marketing. The two were soon talking about the Dead.

Interview by Mark Healy & Design by Jeremiah McNair

What’s happened in marketing in the past 10 years that’s reinforced the Dead’s lessons?

The most widespread one is probably just people giving away content for free: The rise of podcasting, YouTube videos, Instagram. All of these channels are essentially people providing content to the world with the hope that it will return to them something in the future. It harkens back to the Grateful Dead, who built a social network around allowing people to record their concerts and share and make copies of the cassette tapes with one another. So the Grateful Dead essentially created a social network before Mark Zuckerberg was even born. And now those ideas of creating a social network have become super powerful for any organization. And now that we've gotten so many other ways to create content, rather than bringing a big fat set of recording gear to a physical concert—which is what originally happened in the late ’70s—now you just flip on a switch and you're creating a podcast or video.

The Dead had a unique content strategy: maintain tight creative control over the content, but almost zero control on monetizing the distribution of that content.

Yes. A Grateful Dead concert is way more than the music—it’s an experience. It's being part of a tribe, the culture of the concert. Most people come early to hang out in the parking lot. The band usually plays for an hour and a half and then there's an approximately one hour break, which is radical. Not many bands do that. And then you do another set that can be as long as another hour and a half. People come for the entire experience; they’re doing it for the entire experience. And that's something that you talk about at Ceros, right? Your focus is on creating better experiences on the web? What makes a website more than a website, but an experience? Some of the things they pioneered are what you doing at Ceros

Since the pandemic hit you wrote a quick book about how to create memorable events during a global quarantine called Standout Virtual Events. Already, you’ve spoken at hundreds of virtual events which makes you something of an expert. Is anyone doing it well?

I'm most impressed with Tony Robbins.

Speaking of live experiences, you’ve seen 75 Dead shows and spoke at hundreds of conferences over the years. What has the pandemic done to those events?

Who else is doing either marketing or events or bringing a level of creativity to either of those right now that you're impressed with?

I speak at Tony Robbins’ Business Mastery events, and Tony is a remarkable speaker. It’s super high-energy, and it’s exciting to be there live. There are a lot of elements that the in-person event delivers. So when the pandemic shut down all of Tony's events—including the bigger events he does in a sold-out basketball arena for 20,000 people—he really dug in and reimagined what was possible. He built a studio near his home in Palm Beach, Florida. It’s a big room around a 50-foot round screen that’s 20 feet tall. He created an amazing experience. If you turn on your screen share, it allows the speaker (often Tony) to see 2,000 people on Zoom at one time. There's five cameras in the studio with 30 people working behind the scenes. And what was really interesting is that many members of the audience liked it better than in-person, because they all said it felt more intimate. Because if you're watching Tony (or me at a Tony Robbins event), in-person you might be 50 or 100 or 150

Your book, which was an unlikely book to begin with, is now 10 years old. How is it aging?

Well, in fact. The English version has gone back to print a couple of times. And fortunately, there's not much in there that’s terribly dated. I mean, we clearly wrote it 10 years ago and a few things have happened since then, but fortunately, you can read it right now and it can be perfectly applicable. So from that perspective, it's aged well. People still like it, still pick it up and read it. It’s wildly popular In Japan—the Japanese version actually sold more copies than the English version did here. They did a fabulous version of the book in the Japanese language and it rose to be the number four nonfiction bestseller that year in Japan. So go figure, right? And you know, the Grateful Dead never even toured in Japan. So, it was just that idea—when someone is introduced to something that's so different, that's iconic, that has a different business model than they're used to, it’s sort of exotic and interesting.

It’s not like the Dead set out to create a visionary business model. They were just making music.

You know, none of it was done as marketing. I had a chance to speak with Bob Weir about this and he laughed. "‘Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead? What are you talking about? We were just making this up as we went along.’" It wasn’t like anyone said, ‘Oh, hey. If we give away our music by allowing people to tape our shows, we will then make more money.’ It wasn't that kind of calculation. But they were always looking for ways to do right by their fans. And when they learned that fans were recording the concerts, they had a choice. They could either clamp down and stop it, or they could allow it. And they had a debate, then they decided that the right thing to do was to allow it. So it wasn't a marketing decision, per se. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, we should do this. Because, you know, we'll be the pioneering example of giving away free content and creating a social network.’ They just said, ‘Let's do right by the fans.’

And that’s kind of the foundational business lesson to treat your customers right?

That’s right. And it's a problem that we have in business in this country. Because so many businesses, especially those that are public or venture-funded, are slaves to the quarterly numbers. And as soon as you become a slave to the quarterly numbers, it's much more difficult to do right by the fans. If you do right by the fans, you're setting yourself up for success next year, and the following year, and in the following decade. If you optimize to bring in money today, you might make a different decision. And so, the Grateful Dead taught us that if you optimize for the fans, you have longevity. They've been doing this for 55 years, there's still selling out stadiums and arenas. It's a remarkable success story.

I want to touch on your other new book, Fanocracy, and the whole idea of not just creating customers but fans. From a marketing perspective, a fan is so much more valuable than a user.

Yeah, because they, I mean, we're so much more valuable because they're also the best and most trusted evangelists for the organization.

And they're there for the long term. You know, if an organization simply focuses on their products and services, people can find something to replace it. One of my favorite recent examples of an organization that builds fans is Peloton. I'm not a Peloton user myself, but I've spoken with several dozen people who are rabid fans of Peloton and I've asked them all the same question: ‘Okay, so, if another company comes along, and they offer a service just like Peloton, but it's half the price of the Peloton monthly subscriptions, would you switch?’ And 100% of those people say, ‘No, I wouldn't switch. It's all about Peloton.’ And that isn’t something you can say about most products or companies. Think about your own organization, you want a tribe of people that support you, even if something better, faster, and cheaper comes along. And that's entirely possible if you create fans.

And did and obviously creating fans is not as simple as doing one or two things. But if there's one thing that a company does that creates fans and not just customers. What would that be?

Yeah, there's a bunch of different prescriptions that we talked about in our, in our book and examples of that. But something very specific for our times right now when it’s possible to meet customers face to face, the use of video is super powerful. And that's also rooted in neuroscience, because of a concept of mirror neurons where our brain processes video is if we're actually meeting people in person, so that if you look directly at the camera, casual sort of approach to video. Put video on your websites, create a YouTube channel, use video on your social networks—that's a way to engage with people, even when we can't meet with them in person. And so, you know, I would suggest that right now, that's something that that organizations should look into. And most companies are not making effective use of video. And I'm not talking about just zoom meetings, I'm talking about video that shares

One thing that comes to mind is the whole self-publishing model. Originally, the Grateful Dead went with Warner Records for the first couple of albums, but then they created their own record label and got distribution through somebody else. That was a pretty radical step for a band to take 50 years ago. And so fast forward till now: the Amazon publishing platform makes anybody a publisher. And there are equivalent models for publishing podcasts and music and news. You could write a book, get a cover designed, get the interior designed, then publish it using Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing app, and have it for sale a couple of hours after you upload it. Anybody can be a publisher, and that's something that the Grateful Dead did 50 years ago when it was super hard to do.

What else do you see in today’s content and marketing that echoes lessons from the Dead?

Right. And to do both of those things at the same time is super interesting. On one hand, start your own record company to control your music, but allow people to tape the music in the concerts and share it far and wide.

Well, I've studied this for the last six months and even written a book about it. Because I'm a professional speaker, I will normally speak at 30 or 40 in-person events in any given year. My last in-person event was March 2nd, then everything completely stopped. But since then, I've been a speaker at close to 50 virtual events—and the virtual events have evolved quite a bit just in the last six months. At first, people were trying to recreate the in-person event online, and it just doesn't work. Taking what you do as an in-person speaker and stuffing it into Zoom does not work. So you have to reimagine what's possible. An in-person speech is a theatrical event: you have to project to the back row, you have big gestures so they can be seen, you involve the audience in a physical way if you can. And as a speaker, you

Giphy

BBC

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went along.

Fine Art America

photo credit

content that shares information, video that that you use to engage with people and to build friends. Text is great, photos are great. No problems, but video is a very, very powerful way to reach people. Because of the ways that our brain processes that video. You know, it's the reason why you feel you know, a movie star. You know, you intellectually I know, I've never met, say, Tom Cruise, but my brain is telling me I do because I've seen Tom Cruise on video, I've seen Tom Cruise talking to me, essentially. And that's through this power of your neurons. So you can use the same technique by using effective videos on your website and social media.

born.

Content Wants to Be Free

If You Want It Done Right…

Experience Matters

Not Your Average Control Freaks

Who Stands Out?

The New Live

The Accidental Marketing Genius

Know Your Audience

Build a Tribe

Fans > Customers

QUESTION 14

AP Photo \ Tom Costello

I'm most impressed with Tony Robbins. (this guy)

QUESTION 7

And the band didn’t enforce licensing for their artwork or their logos, either

Yes, the same was true when people started to use the logo. Originally, in the parking lot, people were selling t-shirts and other gear that had the logo on it. And the band was like, You know, what should we do? Do we clamp down? Do we say no? How do we do this? And, so the sort of compromise was, you know, if you're making a lot of money, by selling hundreds of t-shirts, you have to license the logo. But if you're a craft worker who lovingly creates a couple of pieces to sell in the parking lot, that's cool, keep going. And so, those decisions were about how to do right by the fans. And I think they struck the right balance in all those cases.

Loosen Up Your Brand

Interview with

photo credit

David Meerman Scott

Author, Speaker, Strategist, Marketing Conference Veteran

First Dead Show: New Haven Coliseum, 01/17/1979

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can see and hear and sense the audience and how they're feeling and how they're reacting. You know instantly whether your joke is hitting, or your ideas are resonating. And none of that is possible in a virtual event.

decision.

Oh, absolutely. The newest book is called Fanocracy, which I wrote with my daughter, Reiko. We focused on understanding the science behind how and why people become fans of something. And it turns out that a lot of it's rooted in neuroscience, because we humans are hardwired to want to be part of a tribe of like-minded people. When we're part of a tribe, we're safe and comfortable. And that goes back tens of thousands of years, when we were roaming around the forest or the plains. And if you're with your tribe, your group, your family, your cohort, you're safe. And so, when a business can create a tribe of people who like and support one another, that's the ultimate. And that's exactly what the Grateful Dead did. They knew how to create a tribe. When I'm at a show—and I've been to 75 Dead shows—I know I could turn to anybody in the audience and start a conversation because we're part of the same tribe. And that can be true of a company or organization. It doesn't matter. We found examples of all different types of companies that have been able to develop a tribe of like minded people. And ultimately, that's an incredibly valuable thing, to have a group of people like that.

feet away. But if you're in your living room, and you're looking at it on a screen in your living room, Tony is talking to you. He’s done a fabulous job in figuring out how to do something that many of the participants found to be even more compelling than the in-person version.

Who is Tony Robbins?

The Long Game

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Author of eleven books, including four best-sellers. Featured speaker at hundreds of events in 40 countries.

Author of twelve books, including four best-sellers. Featured speaker at hundreds of events in 40 countries.

tony robbins

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Courtesy Amazon Prime Video

Boston Globe \ Photo Eric Antoniou

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