Listen To The Band Implementing nontraditional methods and best-practice business decisions, the Grateful Dead has had a remarkable 30-year run as a rock icon. Follow their lead, and keep your business truckin'.

Radical marketing, by its very nature, can be applied byorganizations both large and small across a wide diversity ofindustries. It often finds a champion in the most unlikelyplaces.

The Grateful Dead, for example, would seem a strange bedfellowin any collection of exemplary business organizations. A rock'n' roll band, and a defunct one at that, seems hardly theplace to find lessons in brand building and marketing.

Yet the Grateful Dead, over the course of a remarkable 30-yearrun as a rock icon, employed a raft of nontraditional methods tobuild a brand that endures and continues to grow more than fouryears after the group disbanded. The 1995 death of Jerry Garcia,the band's musical and spiritual leader, at the age of 53marked the end of an era as well as of the band. But, if anything,the brand has actually thrived and grown stronger sinceGarcia's death, fueled by a broad and radical marketing plan byGrateful Dead Productions, the band's longtime corporateentity, and an insatiable desire on the part of Grateful Dead fansfor the band to live on.