The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
What Does It Take for Brands to Deteriorate? Tips on Using Your Name to Build Your Brand, and Scott’s Bucket List
Wed, 13 Nov 2024
Scott discusses brand strategy, specifically why some brands have strong reputations while others don’t. He then advises a listener who shares a name with an adult film star and is struggling with those SEO implications. He wraps up with his thoughts on bucket lists and advice to a listener turning 40 years old. Music: https://www.davidcuttermusic.com / @dcuttermusic Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Buy "The Algebra of Wealth," out now. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What causes brands to deteriorate?
Welcome to the Property Pod's Office Hours. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehoursofpropertymedia.com. Again, that's officehoursofpropertymedia.com. I have not seen these questions. So, numero uno.
Hi, property. This is Ben from Chicago. I work in consulting for a well-respected firm and want to get your perspective on brand deterioration, specifically how long and what needs to occur. Thanks for the great work and advice every week.
So who ranks poorly in terms of brand reputation? According to the 2024 Axios Harris Poll 100 reputation rankings, Meta ranks number 97 in overall reputation with a very poor score of 59.6. That's just three spots above the Trump organization and two spots above X. And one spot above Spirit Airlines. So what do these companies all have in common? Brand is synonymous with differentiation.
Chapter 2: How can I improve my brand reputation?
I got five different brands of Frosted Flakes. Which one is different from the other? And why am I going to pay kind of unearned margin, if you will? Or differentiation equals margin. In addition, a brand is sort of trust. And that is you have to trust it's going to deliver against its promise. And the end user wants to feel like they can trust the brand.
And the thing that all of these companies have in common is that people don't trust Spirit Airlines to kind of not to deliver. People, I think, are worried when they get on Spirit Airlines that they're just going to have a shitty experience. The Trump Organization, I think, has developed a reputation for its vendors. and people not being able to trust the organization.
X has been in the news for destroying a lot of shareholder value, lack of safety standards, and just overall vitriol. So it kind of comes down to trust, how you handle crises, whether you're seen as treating your customers well, whether you're seen as being honest, all that kind of good stuff. Who's doing it well? Right now it's NVIDIA followed by 3M and Fidelity. That's interesting.
Chapter 3: What should I do if my name is associated with negative content?
I wouldn't have guessed Fidelity. So NVIDIA, nothing helps a brand like success. And I guess people trust NVIDIA because of its success and beating expectations always. And I think Jensen is seen as a fairly good person and The firm feels future forward. So I think a lot of that just comes down to success.
3M is seen as somewhat of a paternal company that's good to its employees and constant history of innovation. Very sort of American, if you will. I think people feel good. I think their headquarters is in Minnesota and people just like those Minnesotans. Fidelity, I don't know why. I guess Fidelity handles money and people feel pretty good that they're good fiduciaries.
Chapter 4: What are effective strategies for personal branding?
Look, brands are hard to kill. They're just becoming what I'd call less relevant. What do I mean by that?
The algorithm for printing cash was to come up with a mediocre car, shoe, salty snack, sugary drink, and wrap it in amazing brand codes using this incredibly cheap and efficient brand building infrastructure called broadcast television, where 60% of America was watching one of three channels every night.
Then broadcast media became very splintered, very expensive, and people started cutting out the middleman and going to content that didn't, where they wouldn't be pelted by commercial telling them they had restless legs.
Chapter 5: How does trust influence brand success?
And their social graph and their new weapons of mass diligence, including Google, their social graph, TripAdvisor said, you don't need to always defer to the mass diligence or the shorthand of a brand as often. Now, having said that, It's very rare that an individual purchase anything they haven't heard of before.
Think about your inclination to return an email from someone you've never heard of before and someone you have heard of, right? It's exponentially greater likelihood you'll respond to the latter. And the same is true of brands. So just a general level of awareness. is really meaningful. And then you infuse it with associations, hopefully has self-expressive benefit.
Probably the best brand attribute after trust would be scarcity. And that is this notion that it's a limited supply. So now let's talk a little bit about B2B. I think right away, you need to identify what the culture is going to be. And to a certain extent, the culture is your brand. When my first firm In business school, I started a company called Profit when I was 26.
I used to say we have a passion for brand, attention to detail, and a sense of camaraderie, and give people a sense of what those core associations are. But at the top, these firms are delivering across the two points of a brand, and that is the promise, and then the performance has to match the promise. So when we say we're proud of our progress, as Sheryl Sandberg said,
Chapter 6: What lessons can we learn from successful brands?
at Facebook, we found out that she was lying over and over and over. Thanks for the question. Question number two.
Hi, Prop J. Naomi here from Sydney, Australia. We're in my late 20s, working in finance, and I just made the big move to New York City this year, taking your advice to get to a big city. Now, here's the thing. In the midst of meeting all these new people, both personally and professionally, I've hit an unexpected and rather awkward problem.
My name, I share it with a very popular adult film star who is very, very famous for her book fetish content. And while I doubt that any reasonable person would confuse my accomplishments with her accomplishments, it's wreaking absolute havoc on my personal brand. I realize, of course, that I can't win an SEO battle against the adult entertainment industry.
But before my name becomes collateral damage in the pursuit of a rebrand, I'd love to get your take. Given how seamlessly you have integrated your name into your personal brand, what would you do in my shoes? And more broadly, how would anyone approach a name change, whether it's from marriage or divorce or immigrants simplifying non-Anglo names? How should they think about this?
Anyway, I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts. And thank you, Scott, for all the work that you do.
Gotta be honest, wasn't expecting this one. Okay. I had sort of a similar issue when I first developed a bit of a public footprint, if you will. Initially, being the narcissist I am, I'd always Google my name. And what came up first about 10, 12 years ago, a gentleman named Scott Galloway, who played for the West Marine Mariners or the New Wales Mariners of football, a soccer player in Australia.
And he was just more famous than me. So he came up and I thought, ah, fuck, there's someone else named Scott Galloway that's more famous than me. But over time, if you're good at what you do, eventually, especially I would imagine an adult film star, that career wanes. I imagine feet age better than most parts of your body, but the thing about being an athlete
a musician, a model, all the vanity industries, and I would imagine being a porn star, is the reason these industries suck is you get worse at them as you get older. If you're in accounting, in 98% of industries, you get better as you get older. I would imagine this adult film star's brand is gonna wane. And if you're good at what you do and you have a strong social footprint and you keep at it,
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Chapter 7: How do I approach a name change for branding purposes?
And this is what happened to me. Now, if you do a search, you know, Scott Galloway, the Australian football player, comes up way, way down the list because nothing builds your brand like excellence and continuing to do good work. Now, in terms of practically what you might want to do on your social media handles is
is maybe even jokingly say your name and then open paren, not the foot fetish woman or not the adult star. Or always make sure, you know, like add something. I say Prof G, so people know I'm a professor. Professor has a really nice name. Really nice connotation to it. And at the end of the day, I think of myself as a teacher, so it fits well. It's easy to say.
If you were to go through the hassle of a name change, which I don't recommend, what you want is something that is easy to spell and that there aren't that many other people with the same name. And those two are in contradiction with each other. Again, though, the key to anything is just having, doing good work constantly. That's over the long term what builds brands. Anyways, interesting question.
We have one quick break before our final question. Stay with us.
Okay, so the other day I was in Portland, Oregon on vacation. I'm hanging out, feeling really good about myself. And I walk past this store where a guy is offering free skincare samples. I say, sure, I'll take one. Then he literally grabs me by the hand and pulls me into his store. And suddenly he's putting like this goop under my eyes. And I'm not a big skincare girly, but I dabble.
And I'm telling you that this stuff was magic. Like, I have the beginnings of crow's feet, but I'm looking in the mirror and they're gone. And he tells me, this stuff costs $1,300, but it is so worth it because you won't need Botox for another three years. How old are you, Amanda? I'm 28 years old. Coming up on Today Explained. The pressure to fix your face. Tell them when we drop.
Weekdays, wherever you get your podcasts.
When comedian Chris Gethard was growing up, he went to a place called Action Park. It was one of the first water parks in the country. And it was built by a man who had no experience building theme parks. Some people called him a berserk Willy Wonka.
Anyone who went to Action Park understood you could get really messed up going there. Not only did we know that, it was a huge part of the appeal.
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