The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Prof G on Marketing: How to Stand Out in a Saturated Market
Wed, 14 May 2025
Welcome to the first episode of our special series, Prof G on Marketing, where we answer questions from business leaders about the biggest marketing challenges and opportunities companies face today. In today’s episode, Scott answers your questions on how to drive engagement in a saturated market, how to build your personal brand, and the unintended consequences of America’s most successful branding machines. Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to [email protected], or drop your question in the r/ScottGalloway subreddit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is covered in this special marketing series?
Welcome back to Office Hours with Prof G. Today we're kicking off a special three-part series, Prof G on Marketing, where we answer questions from business leaders about the biggest marketing challenges and opportunities companies face today. What a thrill! I'm a little bit self-conscious. My whole career, not my whole career, most of my career was about
brand strategy and working with CMOs and CEOs, but I am so out of shape. I haven't taught in over a year, and my kind of brand strategy muscles are atrophying. I'm worried about the next class I teach. I'm going to be one of those guys that should have been put on an ice floe about 15 years ago. I mean, most of the faculty at elite institutions.
Anyways, a little self-conscious, but I'm going to try and get over that. Let's bust right into it. Let's get into it. He's an imposter, but he's your imposter. Question number one.
Chapter 2: How can you engage an audience that avoids traditional media?
How do you market to a world that doesn't want to be bothered? Nobody answers phone calls, texts, et cetera. What medium drives engagement?
That's a good question. By the way, that question comes from teleheaddogfan on Reddit. My subreddit is very entertaining. Entertaining and upsetting. I sometimes go on there and I think, oh, I'm not like that. I'm a nice guy. Say hi, I'm a nice guy. Anyways, okay, teleheaddogfan. The mediums that drive engagement, there's just no getting around it.
Chapter 3: Why is social media crucial for brand engagement?
If you want to build a personal brand, if you want to build an aspirational brand, you have to allocate more money to social. I think about just the amount of time. I mean, you are where you spend your time. One of the reasons I got off X is I found that I was speaking in 140 characters and I was becoming terse
and constantly looking for the weak point in people's arguments such that I could weigh in and press on the soft tissue and make a character or a cartoon of their comments such that I could feel good about myself. In other words, I was becoming an asshole. I mean, that's literally what X is. It's like an asshole turns into a social media platform. And I thought, you know what?
I already have too much tendency to be an asshole. I don't need an environment that turns me into an even bigger a-hole. So you want to go where people are spending their time. And the bottom line is social media is where everyone is spending their time. In addition, the people who kind of set the trend for most aspirational brands are youth, right?
Once your dad starts wearing Nikes, the young people stop wearing them. So everybody wants to kind of follow the lead of an 18 to 30-year-old aspirational male or female. And those people are spending way too much time on social media. So I would say that Social is engagement. I think events create a lot of engagement. Content marketing, if you're B2B.
At L2, we used to put out these weekly videos that went on one of the fastest growing social media platforms in the world, YouTube, and we built essentially our own mic. Instead of paying some PR agency $10,000 a month to get me on Bloomberg or whatever it was. We went straight to consumer.
We went direct to consumer with our own media channels, and we would put out thoughtful research and interesting data that a ton of consumer brands, it was focused on CMOs, would watch the video, and we were constantly in the selection set. So when they thought, you know, I'd really like to benchmark my digital footprint relative to Clorox or Unilever or whoever's in the competitive set,
P&G, P&G would think, well, call that crazy dude and his firm L2. And within about seven years of launch, we were working with a third of the global 100 or the 100 biggest companies in the consumer world. So B2C, I think you got to be a master of social and find a voice and create two-way engagement. B2B, I think it's content marketing or thought leadership.
That's my kind of quick and dirty answer. Thank you so much, Telehead dog fan and Question number two. Our next question also comes from Reddit, user mxt240.
I work for a giant software company. I do nerd work, not face work or management, and I am damn good at it. Every so often I get emails telling me to build my personal brand. What the fuck does that actually mean? Should I always wear cardigans? Do I need a catchphrase? Inspirational bullshit in my email signature?
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Chapter 4: What are the steps to building a personal brand?
I'm well-respected and well-liked by my peers, and I take time to unofficially mentor those less experienced. Isn't there value in hyper-exclusive brands that don't advertise?
MXC240, so thanks for the question. I teach an entire class on building a personal brand. A lot of people think a lot about the brand of the company they're working for, but they don't actually take the time to think about their own brand. And they might think, well, I'm not interested in building a brand. You have a brand whether you want one or not.
A brand is essentially the promise or the associations that are linked to you and linked to your name, linked to your visual identity, linked to you when you show up. Everybody has a certain preset set of expectations, the promise you present, if you will, and then you have to deliver hopefully against that performance.
And ideally you want to differentiate a brand such that when there's an opportunity for a promotion or an assignment, and they have five different cereal boxes, i.e. people to pick from, they pick you. So how do you go about that? The first thing is, I think it's helpful to think of What are your core associations? What do you want to be known for professionally?
And that is the two or three kind of adjectives, descriptors that sort of identify, do you want to be known as especially empathetic? That's important. Those people make great managers. Do you want to be known as especially strategic? And that is, there's a role for those people. I put them on figuring out our six or 12 month plan. Are you kind of no nonsense?
All right, send that person and kind of harsh, quite frankly, and good with numbers. Send that person to the branch in Houston and have them do the analysis and come back and give it to me straight on what's going on with that business. There's all sorts of qualities, features, attributes that are positive or differentiate someone in the work world.
And I think it's helpful to kind of identify what those three things are, those two or three things are, such that they can serve as sort of a guiding light or a religion. Think about religion. It's a set of rules that you try and shape your actions and your life around. So that's how you behave in a way that reinforces the teaching of Jesus Christ, right? What would Jesus do?
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Chapter 5: How do visual metaphors enhance brand recognition?
I remember that question in Sunday school. By the way, rest in peace, El Papa. Rest in peace. Anyways, so think of some core associations. If you want to be really formal about it, find some people in your life you trust. You trust and say, what do you think of when you hear me in a professional context, tell me you're going through this process.
And not only think about the positive things, but also find out if there's anything negative. And here's how you know if that criticism is valid. If you feel as if you've been punched in the gut, that means it's true. If they say something stupid and it's mean or whatever, you can write it off. But if it's like, I remember in some of my student reviews, they said that use profanity too much.
And as a result, it reduces your credibility. And it really upset me. Why did it really upset me? Because it's probably true. And I kind of deep down know that it's true. Now, have I done anything about it? Fuck no. Well, a little bit. In class, I try to tone it down. But anyways, we're going to think about if there's any negatives that get in the way of us.
Then we're going to think about visual metaphors. We are a very visual species. You need to lean into your visual metaphors. Are you losing your hair? Then shave your fucking hair like the dog when he was 30 years old. And all of a sudden back then, in whatever it was, 2004, 1994, it was seen as aggressive and different, right? Are you in good shape? Then get in fucking crazy shape.
Do you have really wonderful frizzy hair? Then have out of control frizzy hair. Do you like glasses? Then wear big Sally Jessie Raphael glasses. Visual metaphors are so powerful. What's the most powerful thing about Nike? Some people would argue it's the advertising or landmark endorsements from Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan. I don't think so. I think it's the goddamn swoosh.
I can recognize the swoosh in my peripheral vision. Can you recognize the Reebok logo in your peripheral vision or Puma? No, swoosh, yes. What does that mean? It means billions of times they're getting unearned media from people on the street who recognize that swoosh without even thinking about it consciously. What is your visual metaphor? What is your medium? Are you really good at giving text?
Are you a great writer? Are you fantastic on TikTok? Can you put out PowerPoint? Are you fantastic speaking in front of people? Whatever your medium is, you need to identify it and then find every opportunity to display your expertise in that meeting and develop a following. I am really good in front of a lot of people. I'm not great one-on-one. I'm very good on video and decent on social media.
I'm not that good on the phone. So I try and shape my interactions, my contact with others around those mediums and specifically avoid the ones I'm not good at. What is the one thing, the product you're gonna own? You have to be known as the go-to person on one thing. When it comes to pivot tables, looking at forecasting, our customer acquisition strategy. Oh, we gotta go to Lisa.
Okay, when it comes to recruiting, sending someone, to Carnegie Mellon to do recruiting and talk about the firm? You know, Bob is just so good, so young, so handsome, so excited about the firm. That's the person we want in front of the people. Well, what about someone who knows how to manage people? They're just very good. They're a player coach. Okay, that's Catherine. We got to put Catherine.
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