Accidental Branding
Note: This article is an excerpt from the book Accidental Branding by David Vinjamuri. According to David, the whole book is about branding. The point of the excerpt is to show that it is also about telling the very personal stories of the entrepreneurs behind big brands – in this case Craig Newmark from craigslist.
I’m standing in front of the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center with Craig Newmark, the founder of the online classified site craigslist.org. Craig, who bears a passing resemblance to the actor Jason Alexander, is talking to his doctor about having his gallbladder removed. Although Newmark is having the surgery for the usual reason (gallstones), he has also been enrolled into a clinical trial. Craig apparently has a unique constitution that allows him to tolerate the vitamin niacin, and he’s been taking supplements. The study is to determine how niacin causes low levels of cholesterol to be expressed by the liver, and the medical team will take a biopsy from Craig when the doctor removes his gall bladder. Craig has come to UCSF on this sunny spring morning for his final presurgical visit. And brought me. I spend the better part of an hour watching stick figures run around a track from what might be the best view of any doctors’ waiting room in the country. Then Craig emerges and we leave the office. Almost immediately, we run into Craig’s doctor in the elevator. We walk outside, Craig introduces me, and the doctor takes the opportunity to explain his research work to us. The doctor tries to clarify the point of his research, and Craig seems to understand him, but he is speaking in technical language; like Charlie Brown in the Peanuts cartoons, all I hear is “Wah-wah-wah-wah-wah.” As our paths diverge, Craig thanks the doctor and puts his hand out to shake. The doctor fumbles with his clipboard, and I suddenly realize he has a handful of test tubes in his right hand that are preventing him from shaking Craig’s hand. The test tubes are full of blood. Craig’s blood. It’s not the way I expected the morning to go.
On the other hand, I am a world ahead of where I started out with Craig. Flash back two hours earlier: I arrive on his doorstep at 8:30 a.m. to be greeted with a gruff, “Who’s there?” When I identify myself, Craig does not seem to recognize me. After I hand him a copy of our e-mail correspondence, he tells me that we have canceled this meeting. I realize that he may be correct. A few days earlier he had informed me he would be in New York in two weeks’ time and asked if I would like to meet in Greenwich Village. I agreed, thinking that this would be in addition to our meeting at his house in San Francisco. Craig reasonably assumed that we would cancel our meeting at his place. So he isn’t quite dressed when I catch him at home. He asks me to wait across the street and says he’ll call my cell phone when he is ready. Twenty minutes later he does just that. Then he lets me know that he has an errand to run after getting coffee, but that I can accompany him. That errand is the doctor’s visit.
It’s an apt meeting with Craig Newmark, who has maintained a mysterious and reclusive air even as he makes regular public appearances. If you haven’t heard of craigslist.org, then chances are you’re either over 40 or not living in one of 450 cities in the United States or 52 other countries for which craigslist.org has classifieds. For the rest of us, craigslist.org has replaced the yellow pages, the newspaper classifieds, and Internet dating sites as the best place to find something-or someone. Virtually anything you can imagine is getting bought and sold on craigslist.org at a given moment. A random search of the New York site on a summer afternoon turns up posts hawking bikes, boats, cars, a 7.5-foot-tall fake Christmas tree ($30, in Williamsburg), a dry-chemical fire extinguisher (if the tree doesn’t work out as expected), a ferret cage, and mounted deer heads.
David Vinjamuri writes the ThirdWay Advertising Blog, teaches Marketing at NYU and runs a marketing training company called ThirdWay Brand Trainers whose clients include American Express and Starwood Hotels. He is a former brand manager at Johnson & Johnson and Coca-Cola. Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. from Accidental Branding. Copyright (c) 2008 by David Vinjamuri. This book is available at all bookstores, online booksellers and from the Wiley web site at www.wiley.com, or call 1-800-225-5945.
