The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Prof G on Marketing: Should Your Brand Take a Stand?
Wed, 21 May 2025
Welcome to the second 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 about whether brands should get political, how to pivot when industry assumptions no longer hold, and why marketers must adapt to a world where trust is shifting from institutions to individuals. 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: Should brands take a political stance?
It likes to get in front, especially about three or four years ago, maybe five years ago, get in front of a younger workforce and talk about all this woke nonsense. Because why it was nonsense is because they didn't believe it themselves. They were just trying to score – Like, acquire virtue. Like, I don't have enough Gulfstreams or shares or options here, so I want to capture social status.
I think that's actually a pretty decent criticism of the Democratic Party. Instead of focusing on the material and emotional well-being of consumers, they want to pretend that they're grabbing virtue rather than actually getting any fucking thing done at the ground level in terms of what actually impacts people, see above inflation, etc.,
Chapter 2: What are the risks of brands getting political?
So I generally think it's a good idea to stay out of politics. I try to separate the person from the politics. I live just south of Palm Beach, and a lot of my friends are Republicans, and I just think they're batshit crazy. I just don't understand how they can tolerate some of this nonsense. But at the same time, I also recognize they're thoughtful, nice people, and I enjoy the friendship.
So I try to ignore it when they put out a reel saying, oh, finally, the truth that these food products cause autism. And I want to write, dude, didn't we go to college together? Are you really that fucking stupid? Because I know that will damage the friendship. So I try to separate that. I also try to separate the company from politics. Now, Profity doesn't do that.
Chapter 3: How should companies respond to changing societal values?
You know, we're a media company. We're a small company. We are highly political because a lot of what we do is putting out thought leadership, opinion, etc. And still, we would probably be a bigger company if I just focused on business and tech rather than taking political stance. But at this point in my life, I get to do whatever the fuck I want. See above.
I'm going to talk about my favorite is when people say in my newsletter. They write, oh, get back to talking about business or things you know. Basically, I got a lot of like, stay in your lane. Well, you know what my lane is? Whatever the fuck I want to talk about. And I've earned that and I'm finally there. Anyways, anywho, for most big public companies, you do want to avoid politics.
Now, having said that, occasionally an opportunity comes along. race relations in the US were capturing a lot of attention. Colin Kaepernick was a great quarterback, two thirds of Nike's customer base under the age of 30, not kind of on board with how race relations were going in the United States.
Anyone who was upset about them embracing Colin Kaepernick, who burnt their Nikes, had to go out and buy their first pair of Nikes. It was a very smart move. They probably alienated somewhere between 5% and 10% of their TAM to embolden or entrench or inspire 90% of their addressable market. That's a really good trade-off. We are in that moment right now.
And essentially, I think that things have gotten so out of control where we're rounding up people with the wrong tattoo, doing really stupid shit around tariffs that's going to do nothing but elegantly. reduce our prosperity, put thousands of small businesses out of business. Doge, which was nothing but literally like, okay, how stupid can you be? We're going to cut $2 trillion.
No, I meant $150 million. No, I meant $60 billion. No, I meant less than the subsidies to Tesla. I mean, that has been handled so well. So poorly, so poorly that Americans are so fed up that the biggest commercial opportunity in a decade – and I said this last week and I'll say it again.
I said it in the last office hours and I'll say it again – is to come out not against Trump so much but to come out in favor of American values of decency. of competition, of being thoughtful around our economic policy, of embracing our great immigrant population, PhD students, of rule of law, of due process. All the things that we've come to expect are American.
That company, that company will register a torrent of new business. I mean, for God's sakes, this guy is flailing, literally flailing. This is the biggest commercial opportunity in the last decade. In sum, with rare exception though, let me finish where I started, you generally want to avoid politics because you are likely going to alienate 50% of the population.
Having said that, on a risk-adjusted basis, this is a calculated risk worth taking. Our next question comes from Instagram. Ambreen asks...
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Chapter 4: What marketing assumptions should you reconsider?
I'm trying to think about not only what's in front of our face, but think around the corner and make bets accordingly. But I think about this stuff a lot. So in sum, you got to make a bet.
You got to have a strategic imperative and hold people accountable and invest additional resources in that imperative such that you can give people the resources to move against or act against what you think is important and where the puck is headed. And also think about, you know, looking beyond the second corner. So what's the corner we're moving towards or where's the puck going?
Video, hands down. Where do we think it might be headed? Reddit and possibly Netflix. Thanks for the question. We'll be right back after a quick break.
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Chapter 5: How is podcasting changing with video?
"'I've only had two full-time jobs where I felt safe,' they share. This is why they're advocating for change. Through deeply personal stories like Burnett's, Sensory Overload highlights the urgent need for spaces, dental offices and beyond that embrace sensory inclusion. Because true inclusion requires action with environments where everyone feels safe.
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Support for the show comes from Mercury. What if banking did more? Because to you, it's more than an invoice. It's your hard work becoming revenue. It's more than a wire. It's payroll for your team. It's more than a deposit. It's landing your fundraise. The truth is banking can do more. Welcome back. Our final question comes from Needalize on Reddit. They say...
I started my career in big agencies back in the early aughts when the internet was young. However, even then we were talking about how the media was splintering and how it was getting harder to get noticed. As you know, the trend has gone into overdrive.
Audience attention is splintered across endless platforms and micro communities and trust is shifting from institutions to individuals, from brands to influencers. I keep coming back to this question. How does the humble media planner or marketer even navigate this reality? The age of the all-powerful monolithic brand feels like it's fading fast.
And now, resonance doesn't come from one big message, but from a thousand fragments finding the right ears.
Yeah, I agree. So it used to be, if you think about it, not that long ago, you could capture a third of America in about four nights because two-thirds of America was watching one of three channels five hours a day. Now that media landscape has fragmented just wildly. And not only that, the costs have gone way up. So we didn't realize how inexpensive broadcast advertising was, how cheap it was.
You could capture essentially a 30-second spot on the Academy Awards 30 years ago was about a fifth of the price, and it reached three times as many people as it does today. So you have 15 times the ROI. And yet people still do it. We didn't realize how cheap it was.
So the fact that media was so inexpensive from like 1945 to 1995, maybe in 2000, created an ecosystem where the algorithm for creating shareholder value was to have a mediocre truck, salty snack, sugary drink, shoe, or car. Build an OK slash shitty car, the K car, or out of Detroit, and wrap it in amazing brand codes of...
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Chapter 6: What is the future of podcasting in relation to YouTube?
So consumers can find the best product now using these weapons of mass diligence. So what are you going to see? You're going to see reallocation of capital out of traditional marketing into supply chain, into influencers, into social, and into product itself. And this is hand-to-hand combat. There's no single platform. If you wanted to bet on any two platforms—
I don't know, you'd probably bet on TikTok and Instagram and also maybe YouTube. I mean, there's a cumulative effect here, right? You gotta kind of do it all, but you wanna have influencers, you wanna have evangelists, you wanna over-serve a core customer base such that there's word of mouth and they absolutely fall in love with your product.
I used to use Norelco or Braun or these shitty brands to clip my head. And then I found this clipper from a former East German factory that used to make propellers for Messerschmitts and they make this incredible, Clipper, and I went online, and I found out where it was, and I ordered them, and they're more expensive, which is a pricing signal.
But you can now find the best product or discover it online. So look, I'm not sure I'm saying anything revolutionary here, but the CMO that's like the second lieutenant in Vietnam that gets shot in the forehead within six to 18 months is the one that comes in and wants to do the brand identity and hire a big agency and talk about traditional media. Boss, that ship has sailed.
This is hand-to-hand combat that is a combination of a better product with digital unlocks, huge supply chain investments if you have access to cheap capital, and then trying to identify evangelists slash influencers who can weaponize these platforms to your advantage. That was a mouthful. Thanks for the question. That's all for this episode.
If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehoursofprofitmedia.com. That's officehoursofprofitmedia.com. Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit and we just might feature it in an upcoming episode. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our intern is Dan Shalon. Drew Burrows is our technical director.
Thank you for listening to the PropG Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our PropG Markets Pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.
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