i experienced that 'superior customer value' once...
…and, ummm, it was like whoa.
Via clusterflock, The Atlantic’s piece on The Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead:
Oddly enough, the Dead’s influence on the business world may turn out to be a significant part of its legacy. Without intending to_—while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite—the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America. One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans. It established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house. If you lived in New York and wanted to see a show in Seattle, you didn’t have to travel there to get tickets—_and you could get really good tickets, without even camping out. “The Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior customer value,” Barry Barnes, a business professor at the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me.
What’s not even mentioned here is the economy that the Dead created around the shows, which was responsible for most of those “whoa” moments.