Influential Marketing Blog

10 Questions About "Accidental Branding" With David Vinjamuri

Today I'm trying an interesting experiment with another author, David Vinjamuri. We are doing mirror interviews and posting them at the same time - so he asked me 10 questions about PNI and I asked him 10 about his new book called Accidental Branding. Aside from both being in the midst of the same challenge of marketing our books, once I read his book I realized we approach marketing in very similar ways as well.  David is the founder of ThirdWay Brand Trainers and a Professor at NYU and has been kind enough to help sponsor a session on Personality Not Included that I will be speaking at from 7 to 9pm in downtown NY on May 14th. In addition to talking through the ideas in the book and taking questions. I'll also be revealing a few secrets about the book and promotion strategy that I haven't talked about at all before ... so it should be a good event if you happen to be in NY.  Tickets are still available and if you register TODAY, you'll get a FREE COPY OF Personality Not Included!

Anyway, enough with the promotion - without further ado here are my 10 questions with David Vinjamuri, Author of Accidental Branding, and his great answers ...

1. First of all, I love the premise of your book and how complementary our theories are (Chapter 2 PNI is titled "The Accidental Spokesperson")!  How did the idea for writing Accidental Branding come to you?

Thanks!  The idea came from a class on branding I was teaching at NYU in 2005.   I was teaching marketing professionals who did not have MBAs or a marketing background.  They seemed intimidated by the Harvard and Wharton MBAs working next to them as well as the elitism of brand management as a profession.  I asked them to write a paper about someone who had built a large brand from scratch without an MBA or classic marketing training.  My thought is that it would give them a little motivation for their careers.  The results were intriguing and two of the papers – on Roxanne Quimby (the Burt’s Bees founder) and John Peterman (the J. Peterman founder) gave me the idea for this book.

2. I can imagine some readers may take the premise of Accidental Branding to mean that success is not under their control - are they right?

“Accidental Branding” really refers to the fortuitous accident that most entrepreneurs experience when they realize that there is a problem that they experience and that they can solve it.  This can be Gary Erickson choking on a PowerBar and deciding he can make something that tastes better or Julie Clark failing to find a video with classical music and poetry for her baby girl and deciding to create one herself.   The brand positioning is accidental because it’s done instinctively in that moment.   I do not mean to imply that success itself is an accident.  It clearly takes some hard work and I don’t think it is coincidental that all of the entrepreneurs I profiled did some of the same things along the way.   However, it has to be said that any great success requires a certain amount of luck and that is beyond anyone’s control.  But all of the luck in the world will not help you if you are not prepared for it.

3. How did you narrow down and select the entrepreneurs and business people that you chose to include in the book?

I was looking for recognizable brands started by an entrepreneur without an MBA or classic marketing experience who had run the brand personally for 10 years or longer and who were solving their own problem when they created the brand.  Beyond that, I had to find people who were willing to spend time with me.  There were some great entrepreneurs – like Fred Carl at Viking Range and Jake Burton at Burton Boards whose schedules just wouldn’t permit the time commitment I needed.  In retrospect I was incredibly lucky to get access to the eight entrepreneurs who are in the book.

4. You have some pretty high profile names that you interviewed.  What is the secret to getting onto some of these people's calendars and getting them to agree to meet you and be profiled in the book?

Roxanne Quimby was asked this question at the Accidental Branding launch event at NYU.  She said that I was very polite but also incredibly persistent.  It’s a fine balance.   I worked very hard to get the entrepreneurs to meet with me.  I did not have special access to any of them, so I had to find them through public sources.  Once I met with them it was much easier to get them to commit more time.  I didn’t get everyone I wanted (my original list included Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam and Oprah) but I did get more than half of the people I contacted.

5. Did you draw more upon your teaching experience or on your brand training experience when writing the book?

I actually tried to step away from both and just be a writer and reporter.  I wanted to bring as little baggage as possible to the brands I was writing about.  Only when I was done writing all of the chapters on the entrepreneurs did I step back and think about it as a trained marketer.  That’s probably the strength and weakness of the book – it is very focused on the stories of the entrepreneurs.   My training background definitely came into play in Chapter 2 – where I lay out the rules for Accidental Brands.  I spend a lot of time in my professional life thinking about how to communicate best practices, so I drew on that experience.

6. One of the things that people often say about writing a book is that it lets you charge more for what you do - is that the case and has that been your experience, or are you expecting it to be your experience?

That’s a good question, and I don’t really know the answer yet.  I am very fortunate to run a brand marketing training business that has done very well in the past few years.  I decided that for the three months of April, May and June I would not charge for speaking engagements on Accidental Branding.  My training business, ThirdWay Brand Trainers, and clients like American Express and Starwood Hotels gave me the luxury of doing that.   I do plan to do paid speaking, but I’ve been most focused on trying to get my book into the hands of people who will actually read it and in the short term I regard speaking as a high-quality sampling opportunity; the chance to get people interested in reading Accidental Branding.   I will probably do more speaking and writing and less training as time goes on but I’m lucky to be working with some great trainers who can pick up my slack.

7. You and I both chose to go with large publishers for our books instead of self publishing.  Why did you choose to do it this way, and what advice would you give to aspiring authors about choosing one method or the other?

There are some great success stories in self-publishing but it requires a greater time commitment from the author to get distribution for the book.  I do sense that the publishing industry is changing and I now read 80% of my books on an e-book reader, so I suspect that the rules may be very different in a couple of years.  Either way, if you’re not a celebrity and you are a first time author you had better be prepared to figure out how to market your book on your own.  Most publishing houses are set up like venture capital firms.  They make a lot of small bets on authors and need just a few to succeed.  They don’t devote many resources to each new business book author.

8. One thing I realized after writing a book is that because my last name starts with a B, PNI might often be on the top shelf out of reach from some people.  You'll probably have the opposite issue, given your last name starts with a "V" . have you seen any issues with book placement on shelf so far?

Shelf placement has been very random.  I have been both at tiptoe and ankle level!  I was frankly just relieved to be stocked at Barnes & Noble and Borders at all, since a lot of business books never get that far.  The reality is that it takes at least a year for most unknown authors to build the buzz necessary to start selling well from book stores.

9. What is the single best thing about being an author for you?

Writing! Sounds crazy, but I’ve wanted to be a writer as long as I can remember.  I just looked at my eighth grade yearbook and I confidently predicted I would be writing novels in ten years.  That did not quite happen, but I’m finally writing professionally now!

10. What makes Accidental Branding a success for you?  Is it sales, distribution, buzz, or something else?

I have been thrilled by the attention the book has gotten so far.  The best part has been some of the conversations I have had with entrepreneurs who are building their dreams.  What will make the book a complete success is if I build an audience that is interested in reading another book from me.  I also hope that the buzz from the book will persuade other people and businesses I want to write about to give me the access I need to tell their stories.

Any other questions for David?  Feel free to ask them here ...

How "Location Shifting" Could Reinvent GeoTargeted Online Marketing

There's a pretty simple idea that could transform the landscape of targeted online communications, but no one is doing it ... yet.  If you have ever done any online marketing that has been targeted by geography, you know that there are pretty much only two ways to do it currently online:

1. Based on IP address of where the user is accessing the Internet. Notoriously unreliable because of shared servers and inability to truly pinpoint a user's location.
2. Based on a profile that the user has created indicating where they live. This is much better with two big assumptions ... that people tell you the truth about where they are, and that they are usually there (as opposed to travelling).

For someone like me, this system makes it impossible to target me on a geographic basis. I am always travelling, often using Internet through shared connections in multiple locations, and my Facebook profile says I belong to the San Francisco network (intentionally), even though I live in DC.  My email address has the word Australia in it and I registered it while I was living in Australia and never changed my region. There are a lot of other consumers like me, making it tough for any business to truly target geographically by relying on such uncertain data. The one solution with promise involves using the mobile platform to geotarget based on where a person physically is. This is good, but still incomplete because it doesn't allow you to predict where someone will be.  What if there was a way to geotarget your messages not to where a user currently is, or even where they say they live, but to where they will be?

This is possible today, because more than ever before, people are now broadcasting where they are going to be and what they are currently doing through social media.  Look at a platform such as Twitter, where people routinely update their status to indicate where they are and what they are feeling.  Or a travel site like Dopplr, which I use to update my upcoming trips.  To a degree, this is private information - but many people publish it live for anyone to see.  Location shifting means geotargeting your marketing communications based on information about location that your consumers are giving you or posting online.  As a result, if smart marketers started using this information, a whole range of things could be possible:

1. Banks could verify that you are travelling and not have to cancel your cards because of suspected fraud
2. Marketers could send special offers to people who express a particular sentiment in a certain location (eg - someone Twitters that they are hungry in Manhattan, and gets a Twitter message back with a coupon to a local pizza shop)
3. Car services could automatically update their drivers who are waiting for pickups
4. Your friends could invite you to events through social networks based on where you will be and not just where you live

What else could be possible with location shifting?  Let me know if you think this idea works.

OSG: The Secret Metric For Measurement Every Marketer Wants

Just over a week ago during lunch at the New Communication Forum, I had a great conversation with Tim Tozer from Radian6 (a social media monitoring service) about the real metrics that marketers are looking for and the increasingly common difficulty of finding metrics that are actually useful and offer actionable insights. Many people who have to contend with web analytics tools today will tell you that it is no longer an issue of having the technology available to measure things online, but rather the analytical ability to hone in on the metrics that really matter. Tradition, when it comes to metrics, is the paralyzing factor because it forces many brands to think about metrics in the same way they always have ... with impressions or clicks and little else. Of course, with social media it becomes much more complicated to decide what to measure as activities may not have a direct relationship with "conversion." The one thing that has remained consistent, though, is the thing that all marketers are really looking for, but many are afraid to admit it. It is something I summed up in the title with a short acronym: OSG.

OSG stands for One Sexy Graphic. OSG means two simple things:

1. Metrics that are easy to analyze and act on
2. Metrics I can show to my boss to explain what I'm doing

If you think about it, smarter metrics comes down to understanding what to measure, but it also requires that we find a smarter way of visualizing data so that it looks appealing and intuitive. During the Web2.0 Expo, there was an interesting exhibit at a party from an artist named Aaron Koblin who has created several of these data visualizations. These were presented as art, but it struck me that his pieces were really what marketers have been longing for. A highly visual representation of complex data in a way that allows you to infer lots of learnings and insights. Perhaps the real need here is something that OSG minimizes through humor ... but the not so revolutionary idea is that we need to rethink the way that we visualize data to focus on true insights rather than what we have traditionally always measured. If a picture is worth a thousand words, OSG can be the difference between proving the effectiveness of a social media effort in a way that people understand, or having lots of numbers in a complex report destined to be ignored by all those who almost read it.

A Different Approach to Book Signing - Tonight in DC

I've done a few book signings in the last few weeks and it has been an interesting experience. In the romantic view that many people might have about the life of an author, these book signings are mega affairs with lines around the block and a steady stream of people. In reality, they are usually poorly attended, pathetic microgatherings that can bruise the fragile egos of many authors (particularly those who have an inflated sense of their own importance because of how popular they are online - c'mon, you know who you are!) Despite this truth about book signings, however, the other truth you rapidly realize once you publish a book is that EVERYONE cares about having a signed book. Even people who would never read it. There is something irresistible about the fact that it is signed. So how do you still give people that experience of getting the signed book, but make the event of a book signing something more interesting?

We are trying an experiment tonight in one way to do it, by combining a book signing event with a social and networking event. Unlike my launch party in San Francisco where I intentionally did not sell books and made it more of a celebration of the book launch, the event tonight in the DC area will include an "official" book signing at Barnes & Noble in Clarendon (a big one with a great location, for those of you who are not in the DC area), followed by drinks and dinner at a local restaurant called Whitlow's on Wilson.  It is sponsored by the Social Media Club and so far on the Facebook event page we have nearly 50 people signed up to attend with another 50 maybes (a GREAT showing considering the average non-celebrity book signing draws only about 15 people, according to Barnes & Noble).  In my limited experience, it makes a big difference whether a book signing is combined with something else, like a social event or a speaking engagement, in terms of whether people actually connect with the book. 

As I have said before, the nice thing about writing a book about personality is that it forces you to think differently about the types of events and promotion that you do.  And if there's one piece of traditional book marketing that could use an new approach with personality, it's the tradition of book signings.  So for everyone who gets a book signed tonight, you should know that I do more than just sign the books - I also reveal a secret from the book.  So if you are in the DC area, come out tonight ... and if you're not, you'll have to hit up your friends in the area to tell you about the secret, or stay tuned for a book signing/event in your area.  I have plans to do something in New York, San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Boston, Toronto, Las Vegas, and Miami in the next few months - and hopefully international after that.

Plse Forgiv Typoes - Jott Fights Terse Reply Syndrome

For anyone who uses a Blackberry religiously, or works with those who do - you also know that there is a new language that has emerged for that mode of communication. Similar to text messages, brevity is a growing necessity with Blackberry communications and it is leading to people doing things like including a disclaimer at the bottom of their emails apologizing for the short replies, and possible grammatical and spelling errors of their message. Apparently having small keys is enough of an excuse to spell poorly and forget about periods or commas.  I wish we had that excuse when were were in school. Still, we have all seen this effect and to a degree have probably learned to accept it because there wasn't an alternative.

Probably, you don't even think about it anymore ... until a campaign like the "Terse Reply Syndrome" from Jott reminds you that those short mistyped replies are no way to communicate. Jott has a beta service that allows you to speak a reply into your Blackberry and it will type it for you. That alone is an interesting and useful service (assuming it actually works), but as a marketer you can learn a lot from their approach to launching it. The Terse Reply Syndrome (TRS) is a situation that most businesspeople will immediately recognize, whether they have been on the receiving or sending end of these types of messages. And we would all love to find a better way. The campaign works because it talks about a real situation of need that many business people will be familiar with, and presents a solution that allows you to use the same tools you are used to using. Their videos (shot in the style of a "when the moment is right" Viagra ad), promise "side effects" of longer more thoughtful replies, less thumb stress, and more free time.

This is where the message really hits home, because you can have better communications without giving up your Blackberry. Their useful blog offers further tips on how to effectively use their service, and it even works with lots of common social media tools. The service is in limited beta and free at the moment, but you should sign up quickly because eventually it will be a paid service. It's easy to imagine this is one of those few services where once you try it for free, you are probably going to pay for it.*  Smart marketing combined with a great and useful service. This is the type of Web2.0 service we could all use more of.

* Note - This post is about the marketing behind Jott. I haven't been able to try it yet as it doesn't appear that you can use it on a Blackberry that is issued from work when your employer doesn't pay for phone access (which my employer doesn't). If anyone knows a way around this, please share!

Innocent Drinks Introduces Their First "Annual Grown Up Meeting"

One of my favourite examples of a brand with personality is Innocent Drinks, the smoothie maker from the UK that has built their business out of doing things a bit differently. From their annual charity drive called The Big Knit where they support Seniors knitting little hats for their smoothies (to be sold supporting a group called Age Concern), to the way that they approach all of their marketing and communications ... the brand is the ultimate example of how to build your business by having a unique identity. That even extends to their product, which lives up to their simple tagline: Fruit and Nothing Else.

So this past weekend, when the company decided to hold their Annual General Meeting and release their first annual report, it was sure to be a unique experience. Throughout the day on Saturday you could follow along with the proceedings through Twitter, Flickr and the official event blog.  Innocent Drink enthusiasts were invited to participate in this meeting, abbreviated AGM so it could also be called "A Grown-up Meeting." If you check out the archive of materials, you'll see a particularly interesting conversation that came out of the event, and one that was captured through social media tools for the world to share. The blog has everything from photos of their annual report to videos on a YouTube Channel answering questions such as where the founders of the company first met.  The event altogether offers a tempting thought ... what if your annual general meeting (or whatever you call it) was actually a chance for your most vocal customers to get together and share their passion for your products or services with the world?  What if  your annual report could be described as "lovingly prepared" and actually lived up to that promise and was entertaining and reflected the best of your brand, as well as all the results for the year?  That's what having a personality means.

The Future of Marketing at New Comm Forum

Today I will be moderating a panel at the New Communications Forum here in Santa Rosa, California which I'm particularly excited about because it's exactly the kind of juicy broad topic that I think can yield really interesting discussions. Our panel has the open charge to talk about the future of marketing and advertising (doesn't get more broad than that!) and has a great diversity of speakers including Ken Kaplan from Intel (representing brands), Neil Chase from Federated Media (representing publishers and networks) and David Takheim from Six Apart (representing platforms and publishing tools). The composition of the panel should already tell you something about what the future of marketing and advertising may hold ... as I'm probably the one representing the traditional model since I'm from the big agency (ironic considering what I do for a living!)

There are a few big questions on my mind for this panel that I plan to share in our conversation. I don't usually do this, but here are the questions that I predict I will ask during our panel session:

1. The ongoing tension between PR and advertising silos often comes down the difference in philosophy. In PR, we talk about "earning" media, and in advertising we talk about "buying" media.  In the new world of marketing and advertising, how will we see the balance between earning and buying shift?
2. Are blogs really the future of media? How important are or should they be in an an overall communications or marketing strategy?
3. A hot topic in most marketing trades is the shift of dollars to the online and social media space from advertisers. A hot topic in the general media is the consumption behaviour or people shifting. Is one ahead of the other?  If so, do the dollars need to catch up to the audiences, or the audiences need to catch up the dollars?
4. How important is or will content be to the future of marketing and advertising? This is not about taglines but about actually creating something useful, interesting or entertaining for people to watch or read ... and having that be your marketing message.

For those who have participated in panels with me before, or heard me speak about doing it, you'll know that I have a rule never to walk into a session like this with more than 3 to 5 pre-scripted questions. The reason is that it forces me to pay attention and react to the conversation on stage by coming up with new questions on the spot. In the end, usually the result is a much more interesting panel discussion.

* Full Disclosure - Intel is an Ogilvy client and I work directly with Ken.

6 Secrets of Successful Book Marketing

I've probably worked on hundreds of marketing campaigns in my time over the past ten years working at agencies. And what I realized these past few weeks as I've been launching my own book, is that I've never worked on a book launch among all those campaigns and that it's different when it's your own project as opposed to something you work on for someone else. I thought about doing a recap of the entire marketing effort behind PNI (including the things I am still planning but haven't yet launched), but that's only something you can do a year or longer after launching the book and seeing the results of effort. Of course, waiting that long seems like way too long to share some things I have already learned, so here's a first list of some "secrets" I've learned so far about working in the publishing industry which will hopefully be useful for you whether you are launching your own book, or some other product or service:

1. Provide a vision. Lots of people will want to try and help you with a book when you come out with it because it is exciting. The trick is to keep them excited about it beyond the initial buzz of meeting you or hearing that you have a book out.  My vision for the book had partially to do with a very short and powerful elevator pitch ("personality matters") which I have been talking about since my first post about the power of personality picking it as the trend to watch for 2008 back in my first post of the new year. The vision for the book is what people can believe in, and what has propelled much of the buzz from people so far talking about it.
2. Avoid the big bang. Lots of books launch with a big burst of activity and then fade away. Instead, my marketing strategy for PNI extends for more than a year. There is lots of activity now and you could be forgiven for thinking that I am using the same "big bang" approach as other books ... but trust me when I say that there is a much longer term approach to how I am promoting this book.  I expect peak sales for PNI to come a year or two from now, and hopefully continue. I aimed to write a book that was international, had a shelf life beyond the usual 2 years and that would build word of mouth as more people puchased, read, and used the ideas within it. "Bum rushing charts" is great for a spike, but I am building a brand around the book that I want to last for far longer than a weekend.
3. Know your competition. I know that I released a book in the same time frame as the long awaited Groundswell from Charlene and Josh from Forrester (both of whom I know and have great respect and admiration for). On occasion, I get a question about what it is like to be "competing" with them by having PNI come out within a week of Groundswell. I don't see it like that firstly because we have very different books (mine is only peripherally about social media and is actually more of a marketing/branding/entrepreneurship book). Secondly, and more importantly, we are not with the same publisher. My real competition is any other book from McGraw-Hill that is part of their Spring 2008 catalog which is competing for marketing resources from the MH team. So far PNI is the lead title from McGraw-Hill's entire Spring catalog. That's why we managed to presell more than half of our entire first edition run to bookstores (more than 10,000 units) before the book was even released.
4. Get used to uncertainty. When you launch a book, there are a lot of elements that are out of your control. The actual release date, the binding, the timelines ... everything will start to seem a bit haphazard and uncoordinated. Luckily, I have a lot of experience working with big brands, so the experience of working in an environment where you are not quite sure of everything that others are doing to work on the same challenge as you is a very familiar situation for me. The main way I have learned to tackle this is by sharing more openly what I am doing and reacting to new information quickly as I get it.
5. Build a team one by one. My book is all about how you need to make the individuals in your organization the ones that can speak for your brand and bring it to life. In publishing, this means selling the concept of the book to all the people from my publisher who may have the chance to touch it. I have been directly emailing more than 25 individuals in offices around the world at McGraw-Hill to build relationships with them and bring them into the marketing team for PNI. I know what it's like to have multiple projects to work on each day ... I've done that in agencies for many years. Now that I'm the client, I'm taking my own advice and trying to make my project the one that team members choose to work on more than any of the other ones on their plate.  I want PNI to be the project they tell their families about with excitement after getting home from a day of work.
6. Launch quickly, iterate and move on. This is a lesson that more and more marketers are starting to embrace, in part because of the perceived success of a brand like Google in just trying lots of things, seeing what works, and then focusing on that.  The nice thing about being my own client is that I have ultimate say on whether to do something or not. And the tact I've taken with most campaigns around the book launch is to decide quickly and do it. The virtual interview idea that I had on book launch day (March 28th) which resulted in buzz on more than 60 blogs was an idea that I had just four days earlier. It fit with my strategy, was implementable and so I did it. I will soon be launching a follow up to that effort (next week) that should get even more buzz. Stay tuned for that announcement next Monday.

This list is based on a few months of promotional effort for Personality Not Included.  As time runs on, I hope to have even more insights to share ... as well as more detailed results behind them to illustrate just how effective they really are.

Celebrate World Creativity and Innovation Day With A Free Copy Of PNI!

You may not realize this, but tomorrow is World Creativity and Innovation Day (CID). CID was first celebrated in 2001 after a decade of collaboration between four Canadian faculty members at the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) in Buffalo, NY. It is now a global event that celebrates humanity working together to use creativity and innovation to solve some of the big challenges the world faces. As part of the celebration, a company called Metamemes is offering a promotion around their product for organizations called the ThinkCube.  Some of you may remember I posted a review about this product several months ago, recommending it as an ideal solution for managers or creative thinkers charged with helping their organizations to be more creative.

Right now, the good folks over at Metamemes are running a promotion where you will get a free copy of Personality Not Included with every ThinkCube! I spoke with Kes, the founder of Metamemes, about the promotion and we agreed that it is a great partnership of products because each of our efforts are focused on very similar goals. Our common challenge is to provide the tools to let passionate individuals change the organizations within which they work and rethink the work they do. This is all about creativity and innovation - so join me in celebrating CID tomorrow, and pick up a ThinkCube if you think it might work for your organization.

Launch Announcement: The Personality Project

Today I am launching a very interesting companion project to my new book which will feature a compilation of amazing voices all talking about the role that personality has played in helping them build their companies and personal brands. The site is called The Personality Project and there will be 100 contributors in total - and I kicked off the site this morning with the first introduction post. Over the next year, the site will feature two new contributors per week (on Tuesdays and Thursdays), including the following people who have kindly agreed to take part in this site as the first ten participants:

1. Rohit Bhargava (the post you’re reading!)
2. Dave Balter (CEO/Founder of BzzAgent)
3. Tony Hseing (CEO/Founder of Zappos.com)
4. Yvonne Lembi-Detert (CEO/Founder of Personality Hotels)
5. Premal Shah (President of Kiva.org)
6. John Bell (Head of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence)
7. Sharelle Klauss (CEO & Founder, DRY Soda)
8. Amit Gupta (Founder of PhotoJojo)
9. Larry Smith (Editor & Founder, SMITH Magazine)
10. Andy Sernovitz (Author, Co-Founder of WOMMA)

On the first of every month, I will announce the next ten participants for the month (on the Personality Matters Blog), and then publish their posts throughout the month. Whether or not you have read the book, you will definitely want to subscribe to the RSS feed or get email updates from the site with the latest posts. Also, though I have already recruited more than half the participants, there is still room to nominate someone who you think could make a great addition to the project. Stay tuned for more information on how to do that on the soon to be created "Join the Project" page, and let me know what you think about the site in the meantime!