M&Ms and assless chaps

(image from here)

We’ve been talking Grateful Dead and Van Halen this morning. Yes, seriously! Add in Iron Maiden and you’ve got something of a heady brew. No, we’re not going bonkers, honestly. What we’re doing is looking at innovation and how conventional businesses can learn from all sorts of walks of life. The music world has a pretty good track record and we’re mining it like mad for great examples. There’s a great book recently out on how the Grateful Dead inspired the whole Silicon Valley Open Source thing.

Grateful Dead and its fans – known as ‘Deadheads’ – have a lot in common with companies like Apple and its advocates. It seems that the GD actively encouraged fans to record their live gigs, actively enabling them to do so, as long as no money changed hands. The same applied to GD merchandise with fans creating and distributing their own designs. So, the theory is that the GD were well ahead of their time. Steve Jobs has apparently played some of their tracks when launching new products…….

So what might Van Halen have to do with innovation? Well, the story goes that lead singer David Lee Roth was such a stickler for detail that every gig came with a massive contract covering complex technical requirements for venues etc. One of the conditions buried deep in the documentation was that M&Ms should be supplied backstage but with all the brown ones removed. Diva-like behaviour? Apparently not. Impossible as it was to check whether the venue had followed the guidelines to the letter, Roth needed something easy to check that would be an indicator as to the professionalism and attention to detail of the venue in question. If the M&Ms had been overlooked, you could bet your life that the rest of the set up was going to be pretty slapdash too – call it an early warning system. David Lee Roth as operations expert and innovator. Time to revise your opinion about the man who put butt-less kecks and spandex on the map!

To finish off, while you might not like their music, you have to admire Iron Maiden for their longevity and for lead singer Bruce Dickinson’s claim to be a true Renaissance Man. Look up his Wikipedia entry – Olympic standard fencer, pilot, songwriter and author for starters – you’ll discover he’s even more talented than you thought –http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Dickinson. What’s more, when it comes to understanding the power of branding and merchandise, Iron Maiden were pretty early to the game. Their mascot Eddie, horrible and gory as he may be, has been a constant in the band’s image since they started in the 70s. He appears as a huge moving effigy on stage, on album covers and plastered all over the massive range of merchandise that the band has offered to its fans from its earliest days. Here’s a band that understands branding instinctively, and easily as well as any so called expert. They’ve also understood the value of merchandise within the music industry earlier than most.

So, some musical inspiration for starters. We bet there’s loads more examples out there for the taking. We’d love to know of any you find.