1. Rock On Ch. 5
By: Travis Guthrie

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. Works cited
• Tuten, Tracy L., and Michael R. Solomon. “The Dark
Side of Social Media.” Social Media Marketing.
Boston: Pearson, 2013. 37. Print.

8. 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