Sebastien Wilcox

Marketers can learn a lot from the Kiss brand. Yep, that Kiss. I saw them in concert a few nights ago. Yep, they’re still touring. And you know something? The music pulled the trigger on my love gun. Yep, I’m using a lyric form a Kiss song to illustrate how impressed I was.

The first Kiss album I ever bought, which also happens the first album I ever bought, was Rock and Roll All Over. The cover looked cool and it was illustrated really well. My older brother had just bought Destroyer and if he had decided to stage dive off a bridge, surely I would have followed.

I was part of Kiss Army. I had a Kiss patch on my jean jacket. I imitated Gene Simmons with the tongue thing and I even attempted to mimic Gene’s fire blowing thing with a lighter and some hairspray but that didn’t turn out very well so I never attempted it a second time. I watched the I was Made For Loving You video over a hundred times and thumped my manly chest like Paul Stanley pretty much guaranteeing that no female in her right mind would ever want to talk to me but that was cool because the Kiss posters in my room were always talking to me and they were saying nice things to me like go buy this new import and go check out our new concert and your brother is stage diving off the bridge with the latest Ace Frehley solo album so I immediately picked up Peter Criss’ solo album and said wait for me, bro.

Thing is, Kiss gets it. They not only understand the music business, they understand the business of marketing. As such, they’ve even become a parody of themselves. They’ve been together for 35 years and that’s pretty insane in and of itself. Their make-up makes them look half their age and they sound just as spandex tight as they did when cassettes were around.

The moral of this post? On my 90th birthday, I want to go see Kiss in Vegas. Who’s with me?