The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Prof G on Marketing: How to Stand Out in a Saturated Market
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
Full Episode
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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. 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.
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?
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