Influential Marketing Blog

How To Manage 1.4 Million People - 5 Questions with YUM! Brands CEO David Novak

No one writes a business book about leadership to help hungry children. Leadership, we usually read, is about having a grand vision. It is about the touchdown pass. No one wants to hear about the months you spent in the summer working out in the weight room. In our quarterly culture, fast results are the only thing that matters, and we expect our CEOs to be larger than life. So when David Novak, the CEO of YUM! Brands -- which owns KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and employs over 1.4 million people worldwide -- first wrote a leadership book, I expected it to be about having a big vision.

Instead, Novak's newly released book Taking People With You is a surprisingly practical step by step guide on how to be a daily leader instead of an annual visionary. This week I had the chance to speak with him about the book and about why he felt it was so important to share his message with the world. His surprising answer for the first motivation to write his book is that all the proceeds from the book go to the United Nations World Food Programme (a CSR partner of YUM! Brands), so it may hopefully help feed some children. His second reason was because he felt it was time to share lessons from a management training program and philosophy he had already been using for 15 years to train over 4000 restaurant managers with huge success within YUM! Brands.

Here were five questions I asked him and his responses:

Q: How important is social media and digital tools to the way that you communicate and take people with you?

A: Even if you are in a huge company, you have to do everything you can to make the company smaller. I do a blog on my travels in the first person. Tell people what I see in each of our markets. I personalize it. I think relationships and having people feel like you are engaged and care is absolutely critical. If you are an "ivory tower leader" and never get out of your office, then you aren't going to get work environment and culture you need.

Q: In the quick service restaurant industry, there is high turnover. How important is what you do to helping address that issue?

A: Great people leave for two reasons. Money is not one of the reasons. The first real reason why people leave is because they don't get along with their boss. Second reason is where people don't feel appreciated. It may be more true in the services business, but it is true in any business.

Q: How important is likeability to leadership and taking people with you?

A: It is hard to like somebody who doesn't like you. You have to be a person that people want to be around. I don't think people follow people they don't like. They don't buy brands they don't like. But doesn't mean you need to run a popularity contest. Your aim should be to get a point where people want to be around you.

Q: What is the biggest mistake that you see other leaders and CEOs of organizations making?

A: Leaders don't tend to be self aware. They don't know how what people really think of them. Leaders are often in a cocoon, seeing themselves in a way which may not be true.  Also, a lot of times leaders will assume that people will just do their job. People want to be part of something bigger. Just because someone works for you, doesn't mean they will just do what you want them to do. That's niave. The real trick to getting results is involvement.  You need to get your people involved.

Q: One day when you one day retire or leave YUM!, how will you want people to remember you?

A: I would like them to remember me as a leader who believes in them and cared enough to pass on the learnings that I was privileged enough to gain. That I was genuinely a leader.

Disclaimer: Ogilvy, my employer, does some marketing and communications work for YUM! Brands. This interview was not solicited or granted as part of our work for them or compensated in any way. Novak's publisher (Portfolio Penguin) came to me directly to review the book, and I accepted.

I Like You, But Not That Way: How Retailers Lose & Win Back Customers

"3D Catalog" is a phrase you will see in a few articles about the retail industry these days. Unfortunately, it's not a cool new interactive augmented reality thing. This is a term that describes the fears of many real life retailers who are afraid of becoming a place where consumers just go to touch and feel products that they will eventually buy from Amazon or another discounted online store. There are plenty of reasons why this is an understandable fear.

Right now the most viewed and popular blog post on Forbes.com is titled "Why Best Buy Is Going Out Of Business, Gradually." In it, author Larry Downes argues that Best Buy is managing to deliver on none of the things like knowledgeable staff or better showrooms which could make them a destination worth visiting. Instead, he argues, it is a retailer of last resort or a place where you just go to see products that you will eventually buy elsewhere.

Borders Books went into bankruptcy over the past year, and one of the contributing factors was they had more browsers than buyers walking through their stores. This past Black Friday retail season, online sales were a higher overall percentage of consumer spending than ever before - and this has been the trend for the last several years.

The whole situation might remind you of a mismatched relationship, where one person just wants to be friends while the other wants more than that.  Those situations never end well. Best Buy wants to marry your wallet, but instead they are getting dumped after a one night stand. It is a sad story, with some fairly clear reasons for why it happens over and over:

1. There is better interactive product information online - with all of the online product demos, 3D product shots and direct information from manufacturers - you can often get the best information about particular products and the ability to comparison shop online.
2. Online reviews are highly influential - there is a reason that more than 80% of all consumers read online reviews before making purchase decisions. We trust in the opinions of others, even if we don't know them personally - and these online reviews are a huge factor in closing a sale, or losing a customer.
3. Retailers can't match lower prices available online - the most logical and common argument is that you can just get any product for cheaper online because the online retailers have much lower overhead to cover because of not having a physical store.

So how can retailers survive this pressure and avoid becoming nothing more than a real life catalogs fueling the sales of their online rivals? It comes down to understanding the three areas where a real life presence still matters, and trying to sit at the intersection of all three. When I think about the real life stores that I have gone to in order to buy a product that I could have purchased online, it was for one of three reasons:

1. Ease - the store was close to me, or the product was large (like a snow blower) and therefore the online channel was too risky or inconvenient and I went to my local store instead.
2. Relationship - I had a personal relationship with a person at my local store and therefore had built up trust in them and the experience that they offered me.  As a result, I continued to go there despite having other options to purchase online.
3. Expertise - In some cases, you just need to speak to someone who knows what they are talking about. Earlier this year when I went to buy a new tent and sleeping bag for a camping trip with my son, I went into the local store to speak to someone who knew our area and could provide useful advice on what to get.

Until retailers are able to find the right way to focus on combining these three together into an experience worth having and sharing, they will continue to lose out to the speedier and always available retailers online.

What David Ogilvy Can Teach You About Good Manners

There are some things in business that no one really teaches you. It is the "instinctive" part of being a professional, and it mostly refers to little things. A powerful reminder of how important those little things are comes from the founder of the brand I work for, David Ogilvy, who said:

"I always use my clients' products. This is not toadyism but elementary good manners."

We all have a filter when it comes to biased reviews or people who we feel are simply being paid to flack for some product. The point most of us forget is that knowledge and proximity can easily translate into affinity. In other words, we often buy the brands we work with - not because we have to, but because we want to.

Of course, there are always examples like the loyal Coke drinker who is required to drink Pepsi because of where he works ... but for every example of forced allegiance, there are dozens of others where the affinity is real and authentic. It should not be a foreign concept that people believe the best product on the market is the one they work for and the one that they know the most about.

The flip side of this is that negativity comes from personal experience as well. For example there are several brands that I had such a sour experience with while pitching for their business that I will never be a customer of their products or services. The point of all this is simple: your employees and the organizations your brand works with are potential advocates, or potential detractors.

So the next time you consider bringing on a new vendor or hiring a new employee - remember that how you treat them makes a difference.  The little things (like good manners) still matter ... as they always have.

Characters Worth Celebrating

For a little less than a year, I have been contributing technology articles to an interesting blog launched by the USA Network (a cable television network) to celebrate people and organizations who are having a positive impact on American culture. Along with fellow writers who focus on all kinds of topics from food to music - my focus has been on technology and highlighting some of the most interesting and innovative products and people who are helping to make a cultural impact.

Sometimes, it is through big ideas - like IBM's Watson super computer that recently competed on Jeopardy ... and sometimes it is micro ideas, like a stylishly designed AM radio. Big or small, thinking about the impact of technology on culture is a lens that can be easily forgotten within the daily struggle to stay on top of all your email or come up with a pithy comment to share over Twitter.

Tonight at 11pm EST/10pm CST, the USA Network will air an hour long special featuring some of the nominees in every category who have blazed new paths in their respective disciplines. The New Media and Technology honorees are the co-founders of Foursquare, Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. Others on the list include Emily Pilloton for Design and her nonprofit design firm Project H, and singer, songwriter, dancer, and "futuristic funkstress" Janelle Monae.

As the social media "twitterati" get ready for what many consider the biggest Interactive festival and conference of the year at South By Southwest this weekend in Austin, USA's Character Approved project offers a nice reminder that behind all the gadgets and networks there is a real impact that technology and new media can have not just on how widely you can broadcast your opinion to the online world ... but also on the culture that we are all playing a role in shaping.

Gilty Secrets: 10 Marketing Techniques From Today's Hottest eCommerce Site

To say that Gilt.com is on fire may be something of a understatement. The site, which features daily special sales of luxury products at discount prices is on track by some estimates to pull in $400 million in sales for the 2010 calendar year. The growth of Gilt.com has coincided with a shift in how many consumers are thinking about luxury products. As a recent USA Today piece noted, "the new world of luxury is less about designer labels and glitz and more about shopping savvy and an I-feel-good-owning-this mentality." Gilt.com has grown to over 2 million members by catering exclusively to this mentality.

What makes the Gilt.com experience so irresistible? A big part of it is the sense that you are getting a great deal on products from brands that are normally much pricier, but smart marketing is just as much of a component in the success of Gilt.com. Taking some time to analyze what makes the marketing so powerful, here are 10 techniques that Gilt.com is using which might help other brands to duplicate some of this success:

1. Featuring amazing imagery.
The experience on Gilt.com starts with amazing imagery. This is clearly not a site selling average products, because everything about the imagery used on the site indicates a premium and desirable experience. More than that, the images are changing every day, which demonstrates that there is fresh content all the time and that the site will be worth visiting again and again.

2. Offering a sense of exclusivity.

Core to the Gilt.com experience is a sense of exclusivity. You need to be invited to join the site by a current member, and only once you become a member can you access all the special deals. The irony of this is that they have plenty of "sneak in" ways to become a member without getting invited through secret links - but the SENSE of exclusivity is what is most important. It doesn't pay for them to actively prevent people from becoming members, but they work hard to make their current members feel as though they are part of an exclusive club.

3. Focusing on the backstory.

Every product sold on Gilt.com has a backstory which is almost as important as the product itself. Why? Because when it comes to many luxury products, there is an inherent need from the customers to have a shareable story that they can tell to others along with the products they purchase. It is not about buying a blender. It is about buying a blender from a Belgian company that has been making them since 1930, and that you cannot find in any retail store near you.

4. Creating an urgency to purchase without excessive pressure.

Every product that you put into your shopping cart expires after 10 minutes. This may seem like a diabolical move to pressure you into purchasing - and to some degree it does work like that. The aim, though, is to limit the amount of time you can hold onto a product that someone else may want to purchase. As a result, the sense of urgency to buy is built into the site, and when coupled with a relatively easy return policy, it means that they can focus more on converting browsers to buyers in a timespan (10 minutes) that most other ecommerce sites would envy.

5. Providing significant rewards for referrals.

Once you become a member, the reward for referring someone else to the site is a whopping $25 in credit - far more than most other sites. This adds to the exclusivity experience, but also makes it likely that people will share their referral link far and wide with others. As you probably noticed, it is working for me also since I used my own referral link in this post as well.

6. Integrating deeply with email marketing.

Every day, members of Gilt.com get an email telling them about the special deals of the day and reminding them to visit the site to purchase those products before they sell out. They have a blog and a Twitter page as well, but for the vast majority of their users, email is likely driving the largest consumption and traffic because much of their target audience are at work where emails often come with pop up notices letting you know a new one has come in.

7. Selling items that are sold out.

As items sell out or are held in member's shopping carts, the site automatically lets you know and gives you a chance to be placed on a wait list for a product. Not only does this add to your emotional sense of wanting a product (after all, if it is "sold out" it must be good, right?), but it creates a secondary sales channel for Gilt.com where you may not have been able to purchase the product you were most interested in, but might come back to purchase it if it were available. The other benefit of this model is that it helps for projections and planning new sales if you have a good sense of the most popular products based on something active such as a consumer being asked to be put on a wait list for an item, versus something more passive such as impressions to a product or brand page.

8. Standing behind products they sell with editorial.

Not only does Gilt.com offer new products every day, they also stand behind the products they do offer. This "seal of approval" concept lets consumers know that the products they are buying are authentic but also tested for quality and will be exactly what they expect. This also allows Gilt.com on the backend to work with more and better companies to feature products because there is an inherent validation that takes place for a brand that does get featured on Gilt.com that may extend to that brand building more of a relationship or awareness among a desirable group of consumers.

9. Creating a daily ritual.

Every day at noon EST, an email comes noting that the sales for that day are open. Conveniently scheduled at the time when many office professionals are taking their lunch break, this consistently allows Gilt.com to create a ritual for their customers. Not everyone will buy a product every day, but just knowing that this format will take place every day allows consumers to plan a visit to the site as part of their day and helps to drive a big spike in traffic because you know that as soon as the deals open online there will be a frenzy to buy the most popular items before they sell out.

10. Customizing to platforms.

Soon after the iPad was launched, Gilt.com was ready with an app for iPad users that allowed them to purchase directly from the app. Today, more than 10% of overall sales come from the iPhone and iPad mobile platforms that this number is growing. By offering a customized experience for users on certain platforms, Gilt.com is making it easy to purchase no matter where you happen to be.

Not every brand will have luxury products or find this daily sales method easy to duplicate, but taking some of the marketing lessons that Gilt.com already knows could help a large number of brands who have some ecommerce component of their sites to create more engagement with their customers, and convert more of them to action as well.

Consumer Reports & Consumerist Help Shoppers Bite Back

One of the most visible effects of the social media revolution is the relative power that is now in the hands of an individual consumer when it comes to spreading a positive or negative experience with your brand to hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people. Shoppers have a voice and it is now far stronger than the occasional review on Amazon or comment on a blog post. As the new holiday shopping season descends in the US, at least one organization is starting the season with an open call to consumers to make their voices heard.

Today Consumer Reports placed a full page ad in the USA Today asking holiday shoppers to "bite back" against retail practices that they hate. In an announcement about the campaign, the Consumer Reports team shared the following stats from a survey run on the Consumerist (a popular blog that is now part of the "Consumer Reports family") about what consumers dislike the MOST:

• 72% Stores that never open all of the checkout lanes
• 68% Fake "sales". If something is always 20% off, it's not on sale
• 67% Coupons that exclude almost everything in the store
• 52% Pushing store credit cards at the register

As we head into this holiday season, watching out for your shoppers biting back isn't just a lesson for those of us who work in retail sales. Consumer opinion will continue to drive purchase, and this will take the form of everything from idle tweets to wall posts on a fan page. Listening to conversations about your brand, products and industry and participating in the conversation is consistent advice from those who "get" social media. This holiday season for many brands, it may be even more than good advice ... it may be a necessary survival tactic.

An Inside Look At Beijing During The Olympics

I have officially been in Beijing for 4 days now. I start this post with that admission, because before you read this I want you to know that I'm no expert on Beijing or China. Before this current trip, I have been here once before. Aside from a few useful phrases, I don't really speak any Mandarin ... and any experience benefit I might have from having been to Beijing before has surely been erased from more than ten years of development and more recent construction and preparation for the Olympics.

Still, I travel often and like to think I can adapt to new places relatively fast. So when I thought about sharing a few of my experiences from Beijing over the past few days, and getting ready for a week of blogging about the Games here for Lenovo, my first thought was to share a few things I have learned so far about getting around and perhaps challenge a few perceptions that people have had about Beijing from media.

1. The Pollution - This was one of the hottest topics in the media about Beijing, that the pollution would create a huge problem for athletes of all sorts. The truth is, the pollution on the ground has been much less of a concern than another simple fact ... Beijing is a hot and humid city. Pollution or not, it is actually the heat and humidity that cause the biggest concern for athletes. I have been to many polluted cities across Asia, and Beijing is certainly nowhere near the worst. In fact, the place I had the toughest time breathing was not related to pollution at all. It was in Lima, Peru thanks to the altitude of the city.
2. The Language Barrier - This is a very real concern about Beijing and means that you need to learn to travel a bit differently. Whereas in many other cities, you can learn to speak more slowly or use a few well chosen words (airport, hotel, bathroom, etc.) and people will understand you, native Mandarin speakers have no such frame of reference. As a result, you need to rely much more on written directions and images. The most useful thing you can always carry with you are a bunch of cards with destinations pictured and written in English. Always get your to and from destinations written down by your hotel concierge, and get used to asking a few people to piece together your destination based on multiple directions (crowd sourcing directions works here).
3. The Olympic Venue Security - Getting into and out of Olympic venues has its own learning curve that are particular to Beijing's games. These are my third Olympics and so I do have a frame of reference, however the security at these Games out of necessity needs to be far beyond what it has been in any previous Games. Most Olympic venues have a single gate of entry, which may require you to walk 1 or 2 kilometers all the way around a venue. The positive aspect of this is that because entry is consolidated, BOCOG can place all their resources in this location, so getting through security and into a venue is a very fast process once you find the correct entrance.
4. The Nightlife - One of the persistent themes in the media you may have seen is that many journalists are calling this the "no fun Olympics." I was speaking to Jim, the blogger behind www.beijingboyce.com, about this and his point of view was that the main problem is that they don't really know where to go. Beijing Boyce is a leading blog in helping people to find the truly fun food, drink and nightlife destinations in Beijing not to be missed, and I have already started using it as a brilliant resource and guide to the city. I wished I had more time to spend with Jim to get more insight, but if you are ever in Beijing, this is a blog you will want to bookmark.
5. The Transportation - Like many other travellers here, I have had my moment of standing around for more than an hour on a street corner competing to catch a taxi with a dozen other people in the same situation. For me, this situation ended positively because it gave me the motivation to try using Beijing's Subway system and I was pleasantly surprised. As opposed to the stifling hot stations in Washington DC (my hometown), the station I used here was air conditioned, brand new and trains ran frequently. The signs were useful and in English and the fare was quite cheap (2 Yuan - about 35 cents) per journey. Taxis are cheap as well to go from one side of the city to another and the measures the government has taken to curb traffic (alternating days you can drive your car based on your number plate ending in an odd or even number) and essentially removing trucks from the roads has been helping to avoid gridlock. I suspect that the weeks of the Olympics may be the easiest time to travel in Beijing.

If there is another area of travel or the city that you have heard about and are interested in knowing more about, leave a comment here and I'll do my best to share some thoughts about it.

Why Sprint's New Campaign Wins Only 50% Of Their Battle

As I tour around at events talking about why brands need to have a personality, a question that comes up often is about which brands don't have a personality and suffer from facelessness. One of the most obvious categories that has built a dreadful reputation for itself is the wireless phone industry in the US. On the whole, people are distrustful, disloyal, and generally suspicious of just about anything these carriers do. The reasons are fairly obvious, from their cruel pricing structure designed to charge you for every kilobyte or nanosecond of use, to their requirement that you lock yourself into long contracts before they will give you service. In my own experience, my last month's wireless bill was 18 pages long (and I don't even have a teenager at home).

There have been a few pioneers that are trying a different model, such as Virgin Mobile with their prepaid solutions ... but the world of the wireless carriers still promises much more flash than substance. For examples of this, just look at any recent advertising campaign by these carriers, from the fanfare behind launching the iPhone for AT&T or the wierd city name mashups used by T-Mobile to illustrate how their network would work in places where they vast majority of their customers will never travel. So while watching my DVR last week, when I saw a TV spot featuring the new CEO of Sprint talking in a more human voice about how they are simplifying their service, I stopped to pay attention. Here's the ad:

This is not the approach we are used to in America from our cell phone providers. He comes off as genuine and the plan they are offering is as simple as you can imagine. Taking this human approach certainly sets them apart from their competitors. The reason why this is only half of their battle is because alongside this declaration by the CEO and new direction are two other telling videos.  The first is a clearly scripted YouTube video read by an uncomfortable employee talking about what Sprint is "really" like, and the other is from an irate customer who received a bill for $14,000 from Sprint and tried unsuccessfully to get it resolved:

Now in the second case, the customer did ultimately get her problem resolved thanks to it getting reposted on the Consumerist blog, but the damage for Sprint was already done. I love the simple plan they have come up with for customers and the authentic way the CEO is trying to tell the story. The problem is that consumers are likely to see it alongside other examples of exactly the opposite. It seems to be a case study in how advertising alone cannot reshape an industry or a brand. Without combining it with a smart strategy for social media and word of mouth, the best laid brand messages will likely fall on deaf or disbelieving ears.

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 ...

Johnny Bunko And The Anatomy Of A Great Business Book

One of the best discussions I managed to make it to at SXSW was also one of the smallest ... a talk by Daniel H. Pink (author of A Whole New Mind) all about the rise of Manga.  It is a topic I am particularly interested in because there is an entire passage in PNI all about it, but Dan's cover article for Wired magazine was one of the pieces of reporting that really put the Manga phenomenon into terms that Americans could understand.  For those unfamiliar with Manga, it is essentially a form of graphic novel that is hugely popular in Japan and growing in popularity across the rest of the world.  He shared some interesting stats about Manga, in particular that 22% of all reading material in Japan is produced in Manga format. 

In the US, the adoption of Manga as a form of literature, fiction and fantasy has been steadly on the rise ... yet, the interesting thing Dan focused on in his session was just how pervasive the form may become as a method of relaying business ideas.  His new book, called The Adventures of Johnny Bunko:The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need is a career advice manual for just about anyone who wants to find a better direction for their career.  In a brilliant move for pre-promotion of the book (which officially comes out in April), he gave a free copy to all the attendees of his early talk (10am the Sunday morning after Daylight Savings Time).

As an author, one of the biggest things that I took away from his talk was that the anatomy of a great business book is changing.  There are two types of business books, tactical and strategic.  Tactical books are a waste of time, because people are seeking that information online.  If you want to learn how to do just about anything, there is bound to be a more recent resource online for it.  So the idea of producing these tactical kinds of books on how to do something aren't worth it.  The thing to focus on, instead, is a book that presents a strategic theory and proves to someone why they should care.  Those are the kinds of books people buy and share.  I totally agree with him, though my book does fit into both categories because of the two part approach.  The anatomy of a great business book means first and foremost to be strategic.  Amen to that ... and definitely go and buy The Adventures of Johnny Bunko today (buy it from The Ultimate Marketing Bookstore and all proceeds will go to Donor's Choose).  No matter where you are in your career, you'll get something out of it.