Rock On Ch. 5By: Travis Guthrie

Improvise

• The Grateful Dead improvised individually and as a

group

• Created a riff and ran with it to have a unique music

experience

• The Dead’sperformances where always different

Experiment

• Because of their mindsets and style they made a lot

more mistakes then other bands

• Jerry Garcia said “You go diving for pearls every

night but sometimes you end up with clams”

• It wasn’t unusual to see many poor performances

and then the very next night it would be amazing

• Never become conservative, don’t stop

experimenting, and always push the envelope

Experiment

• Innovation leads to breakthroughs and success

• CEO’s and Management teams need to let their

marketers be more free and allow for

experimentation

• “The Grateful Dead teaches us to take risks and to

experiment, to learn from our failures and

successes, and to continually move forward”

• Shorten up planning cycles to monthly vs. 6-12

months

Dropbox

• Launched in 2008, allows file sharing across computers

• To help spread the word about the company they used Pay-per-click campaigns resulting in a expensive loss

• Their product itself helped spread the word of mouth and current customers helped refer new customers

• Dropbox used incentives to help gain exposure which paid off

• In 2009 they had 100,000 users and by 2010 they had 4 million users

Rock on

• 80% should be experiments and improvising

• 20% should be your normal routine

• Always be creative and able to adapt

• Don’t worry about mistakes, move forward and learn

from them

Works cited

• Tuten, Tracy L., and Michael R. Solomon. “The Dark

Side of Social Media.” Social Media Marketing.

Boston: Pearson, 2013. 37. Print.

Question

• If you were in a senior level position of a company

would you allow your marketing teams to freely

experiment outside of the traditional way of

marketing?

• Have you ever failed prior to succeeding in your

personal lives? Tell me a story