Let me go ahead and get this off my chest – I’m going admit to having a bit of a man crush on Scott Galloway lately.
I’ve followed him from afar for a while but have gotten a lot of value recently from his Prof G Media Network podcasts, particularly The Prof G Pod, Raging Moderates (co-hosted with Jessica Tarlov) and Prof G Markets (co-hosted by Ed Elson).
It’s a good mix of humor, self-deprecation and biting commentary on some of the bigger issues of our time – from core stuff like politics and entrepreneurship to narrower areas of interest like marketing, branding, travel and even the trends and challenges facing young men today, which I’m particularly interested in as a father of two teenage boys.
His March 2024 TED Talk “How the US is destroying young people’s future” is one of the best TED talks I have ever seen and was followed a month later by a flat-out killer marketing & PR campaign supporting the launch of his book, The Algebra of Wealth, which went to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Although he’s been a regular in national media and business circles for many years, that one-two punch in the spring of 2024 put him fully onto the national stage and he’s leaned into that momentum by building out a great podcast network (in collaboration with Vox Media) and overall platform that I really respect and also get a lot of value from.
He also teaches brand management and digital marketing at N.Y.U. and does one “Prof G on Marketing” podcast episode each week where he answers questions from listeners.
As I was listening to the most recent episode on my walk (866 days and counting!) this morning the second question caught my ear. It was from a leader who was lamenting the realization that he might have to build a personal brand to stay relevant in the future and he asked Scott “is this something I really have to do?”
Scott hit him with the cold hard truth that so many leaders need to hear:
“Just because you don’t want one…doesn’t mean you don’t have one.
The only question is do you want to manage it?”
Preach.
We define branding as creating an image in the minds of your audience.
Whether you like it or not, the first impression most people get of you – your brand – is getting created in the minds of your audience without any interaction with you – on page one of Google, a prompt response on ChatGPT or any other number of potential points of discoverability.
The question is two-fold for this leader asking Scott – and each of you reading this article:
- Do you want to own that first impression of your brand or leave it up to others?
- Do you want to be intentional about creating an authentic image of yourself that accelerates trust and positions you not as someone with something to sell but as someone with something to teach?
Of course you do.
Having an intentional, authentic, mission-driven brand in today’s environment creates an unfair advantage for your company, as Adam Witty and I talked about in our most recent book, The Authority Advantage: Building Thought Leadership Focused on Impact, Not Ego.
I get a little fired up about this because of the urgency that exists for leaders to shift their mindset on their brand.
The opposition most leaders feel to building a personal brand comes from a good place – most of them were brought up in a stay-out-of-the-spotlight mindset that is as well-meaning as it is self-defeating.
The reality is that leaders who don’t get intentional about building the right kind of brand in today’s landscape do a disservice to their company, their teams and themselves.
It’s not an ego thing – it’s a trust thing – and accelerating it is best and highest use for leaders today, as it’s always been.
The difference today is that leaders must be able to accelerate trust for themselves and their company before they ever interact with someone.
Here’s why – your target audience doesn’t want to interact with or learn from your company or corporate brand anymore – they want to interact and learn from you. And not a staged, b.s. version of you – they want to follow, interact and learn from leaders who are visible to them in an authentic, mission-driven way.
Like Scott.
Love him or hate him – and sometimes to the chagrin of his cohosts – he’s becoming more and more of himself as he builds a bigger and bigger audience and that’s something people trust and want to pay attention to.
And that trust benefits his team, his causes, his companies and his audience.
He provides a good lesson for leaders both in the response he provided today on his podcast and in the example he is setting with his content.
