On 10 November, The Retail & Luxury Goods Club hosted KISS frontman and multi-media businessman Gene Simmons for an evening entitled "Dream Big with Gene Simmons." This was an extraordinary opportunity - usually reserved for organisations paying £100,000-150,000 - to meet and glimpse into the business mind-set of the man sometimes known as "The Demon".
With the occasional interjection by his wife and children in the front row, Gene delivered to the 200-person audience an hour and a half of anecdotes, jokes and live demonstrations to drive home several of his key business beliefs: the importance of personal branding, the benefits of personal impact and the necessity for effective communication across languages and cultures.
These are, in his words, the secret to building a business worth $1 billion, which is the valuation he puts on the KISS and Gene Simmons brands.
The over-arching theme of the evening was Gene's deep commitment to extracting the last penny from every aspect of the Gene Simmons and KISS brands - even to the extent of commercialising marriage. Indeed, Gene's own wedding had been broadcast on the Gene Simmons Family Jewels TV show. Towards the end of the evening, Gene's wife, former Playboy Playmate Shannon Tweed-Simmons, echoed Gene's commercial view of marriage when responding to a question from Tybee Kiejdan, partner of Shahar Sinvani, MBA2012. Asked what advice she had for wives standing by their husbands, Shannon advised signing a business contract before marriage to specify how the relationship will create value.
In an unusual proposal, PhD candidate Ari Olafsson nearly upstaged Gene. Picking up on Gene's theme of marriage as business, he asked to marry Gene's daughter, Sophie, to access the KISS fortune. Ari's humorous five-minute stand-off ended with a public introduction to Sophie (who, incidentally, took his business card at the end of the presentation).
Throughout the interactive session, Gene bantered with several more of our students in English, Hebrew, Hungarian and German. He even learned a little from us in the process. For example, that Hindi and Tamil are as closely related to each other as are Mandarin and...Swedish.
So after the dust settled, the press cleared and the cameras stopped rolling, what did we really learn from this event?
As a successful global brand manager and business person, Gene focuses relentlessly on the bottom line; he adheres aggressively to strategies, messages and personae that perpetuate the Gene Simmons and KISS brands; and he capitalises on his size and charisma with steady eye contact, assertive body language and a firm handshake to maximise his aura of power.
Put another way, in apparently frothy industries like entertainment (or retail or luxury, for that matter), total commercial commitment drives financial success. And it can be an awful lot of fun on the way.