Truckin:' Grateful Dead Brand Refuses To Die

Music conveys a magical context for time and place. Most of it remains popular with the generation that first 'discovered' it, secure in having captured the zeitgeist of a particular era.

And then there are legends that transcend geographical and temporal boundaries. The Grateful Dead's music, which evokes a very particular time - the Sixties - and place - the San Francisco Bay area - appears, against long odds to be making that transition. Where legend and brand intersect there is a romantic link with values and themes that have survived and then reemerged. To make it work requires great art - and steely application of marketing science. It is not something that can easily be taught, but it can be learned. For The Dead, from acid to ice cream, it has indeed been a long, strange trip. JL

Mark Miller reports in Brand Channel:

For a band that played its first gig at one of Ken Kesey’s infamous acid tests in the Bay Area in 1965 and disbanded in 1995 following the death of Jerry Garcia, getting involved with licensing and marketing can seem like kind of dealing with evil. But the Grateful Dead brand is stronger than ever, thanks to thoughtful licensing deals for on-brand products and selective lending of the band's vast catalog to films and television The change came about last September when Mark Pinkus, SVP of Grateful Dead Properties at Warner Music Group's Rhino Entertainment, was put in charge of merchandising and licensing Grateful Dead products, according to the Los Angeles Times. "The band wants to turn on that 18- to 25-year-old audience," Pinkus told the Times.

As a result, the “band's music has appeared in at least four movies since April, and over the last several months, the number of licensees has increased 20%, including new deals with Burton snowboards, Dregs Skateboards and Wines That Rock,” the Times notes.

This shift occurred mainly because Pinkus, who attended 73 Dead shows, met with the remaining members of the band – Mickey Hart, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann – and “volunteered to perform any song from the Dead's voluminous catalog,” the Times reports. Hart challenged him the next day with an obscure track and Pinkus was able to sing him the tune. “In that moment, the relationship between Rhino and the Dead surged ahead,” the Times reports.

Don’t worry, Dead fans, there is no plan to suddenly saturate the market with Grateful Dead-logo gear. (A “Casey Jones” toy train that won’t slow down? A “Touch of Grey” hair coloring? “Sugar Magnolia” perfume?)

“The band is looking to add only 15 new items a year from literally thousands of offers,” the paper notes, and none of those things will be drug-related. The band also will look to avoid putting its music into films that glorify drug use.

"We want to avoid as much as we can of projecting our image as the stoner band, because, God, that was just a part of it all and not necessarily the life and soul," Hart says, according to the Times. He and his fellow remaining bandmates as well as the estate of Jerry Garcia — who licensed his art for a line of neckties and famously lent his name to Ben & Jerry's best-selling Cherry Garcia ice cream — will need to approve of any new deals that come along.

Interestingly, the Times reports, "The Dead has turned down all offers for its music to appear in commercials, so don't wait for Truckin' (the most requested song by potential licensees) to show up in a shipping company ad."

Grateful even in its own death, this is one band — and brand — that won't fade away.