David Vinjamuri

David Vinjamuri is President of ThirdWay Brand Trainers, whose clients over the last 15 years have included American Express, Marriott Hotels and the US Commerce Department. David teaches branding and social media to master’s degree candidates at NYU, where he is adjunct Assistant Professor of Marketing. David writes the Brand Truth column online for Forbes, which has been read by over 1 million people. David is the author of Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Brands (Wiley, 2008) and two novels. He is credited as the inspiration for the Soon to Be Famous Illinois Author Contest which won the 2015 John Cotton Dana Library Award for Public Relations. David recently contributed a chapter on Guerrilla Branding to the most recent book in the Public Library Association’s Quick Reads series: PLA 2018: Ten Essential Programs. David has been quoted as an expert on brands in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, US News & World Report, BusinessWeek and Investor’s Business Daily. David has contributed to BrandWeek, Advertising Age, Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly. He has appeared as a brand expert on PBS Marketplace, CBS News, BBC World, Fox Business News, Bloomberg TV and MSNBC. Though David spent the majority of his nearly twenty-year corporate career in brand marketing, his second professional job was as a merchandising assistant and later assistant buyer for a Midwest retail chain. As a brand manager at Johnson & Johnson he hired detail forces to implement plan-o-grams at supermarkets and create displays. At Coca-Cola, he worked directly with large restaurant chains on merchandising and branding issues. Since 2012, David has worked with libraries throughout the United States and Canada to bring these private sector practices to the library world to transform library spaces. David graduated with High Honors from Swarthmore College and was a Citicorp/Walter Wriston Scholar at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.