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- Welcome Alumni
- Alumni Testimonial:
Sharon Joseph
- Alumni Testimonial:
Sharon Cates-Williams
- Alumni Testimonial:
Sally Durdan
- Alumni Testimonial:
David Vinjamuri
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BRAND YOURSELF AS A LIFETIME ACHIEVER! - JANY Talks with JA Alum, David Vinjamuri
JANY Talks with dynamic, JA Alum and lifetime ACHIEVER David Vinjamuri - author of Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Brands. Adjunct Professor of Marketing at New York University and President of his own entrepreneurial enterprise, ThirdWay, Inc, a brand/marketing company, David Vinjamuri reflects on lessons learned from his JA experience and shares tips for branding yourself as a successful lifetime achiever.
- Q: When and where was your JA student experience? What do you remember most about it?
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A: I was in an IBM-sponsored JA Company Program for three years when I was in Junior High School in Westport, CT. The most successful JA Company was during my second year in the program. We made these emergency lights constructed from a bicycle handle grip, a headlight and a toilet bowl plunger! We sold a huge number of our inventory. I was the treasurer and I thought it was crazy that we had to pay 40% of our profits to Junior Achievement instead of to our shareholders. So I increased our salaries by about 500% so that we didn't pay taxes. Somehow this little innovative stunt won me the 'Treasurer of the Year' title for Western Connecticut and Region One.
- Q: How did you go about developing a career in marketing & branding?
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A: I learned from the best. I studied branding at Harvard Business School while working on a Master's Degree at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy. Then I spent almost five years working in brand management at Johnson & Johnson and another two and a half years working in field marketing with Coca-Cola. Another two years in Internet marketing with DoubleClick and Save.com rounded out my professional training.
- Q: How do you define "branding" and "marketing"? What's an accidental brand and why did you feel compelled to write about it.
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A: Marketing is the process of creating and delivering goods or services to those who could benefit from them. Branding is what happens when you gain the trust of consumers for demonstrating your expertise in a particular subject or area. Accidental Brands are created when individuals experience a problem they realize they can solve. I was compelled to write about Accidental Brands because they are almost always built by people who have not been trained in traditional MBA programs. The process of building an accidental brand differs from the way corporations build brands.
- Q: What made you decide to become an entrepreneur?
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A: The average tenure of a CMO (chief marketing officer) is 24 months and that's the career I was headed for. I wanted to have more control over my own destiny.
- Q: In your opinion, what are the challenges of starting your own business and what are the benefits?
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A: It's a huge struggle. You have to be self-motivated, disciplined and stubbornly persistent. The benefit is that you never have to sit in hours of meetings to convince people of what is already obvious to you.
- Q: One of the first and most important brand challenges that all people struggle with is how to market and brand themselves successfully in life. What are your top 10 tips to successfully market and brand as a lifetime achiever?
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A: TOP TEN BRANDING TIPS FOR SUCCESSFUL LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT!
- Focus on the people who really believe in you: they will propel your career.
- Make very few promises and keep all of them.
- Be generous with your time. Try to help people without keeping a balance sheet in your head.
- Understand what you do well and strive to get even better at it.
- Be known for something. Be memorable.
- Don't fit in. Successful entrepreneurs and successful senior executives are often non-conformists.
- Read as much as you can. Read fiction and biography and magazines that do not relate to your career interests.
- Learn from as many people as you can. Seek out great training organizations early in your career.
- Be opportunistic. Know what you want in life, but be flexible about how to get there. Keep your eyes open for different paths to success.
- Find people you admire and befriend them. These are usually people that bring out the best in you.