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Advocacy Secrets of the Grateful Dead

Admittedly I am not a “Deadhead” but I know people who are and I bet that some of them would call it sacrilege to acknowledge the brilliance of the Grateful Dead’s advocacy business model, as written about in this month’s The Atlantic.

Although the writer, Joshua Green, doesn’t call it “advocacy,” the Dead’s strategy for “delivering superior customer value” and applying communications and marketing tactics to ensure a loyal following is a fantastic example of advocacy. The advocacy strategy, of course, was the Dead’s building and cultivating of a legion of fans, the Deadheads. The band used tactics, such as a telephone hotline alerting fans to concert dates, and created a profitable social networking structure unlike any other.

The Dead has long been studied by the academics. Just recently business scholars and management theorists have realized that the Dead were visionary geniuses in the way they created customer value and used social networking. Just another proof point for why organizations can’t afford to miss out on their advocacy opportunities.