I’m writing this blog on social media trends instead of working on a very successful portfolio piece. Because the portfolio never got to happen.

I was very excited to work with a large local shopping center; it felt like a huge deal for my career. Ignoring the fact that I typically work with luxury or wellness businesses. And well, it didn’t work out. While the shopping center said I could use them as a client in my portfolio, I decided that I would rather write this blog. Because we all learn more from failure than from… well, polishing a turd.

The senior leaders nodded in agreement when I told them we needed to work on two things:

A) Differentiation from competitors. Most shopping centers post exactly the same internet memes, with the differentiator being that it’s in THEIR shopping center. Many brands do this — take internet jokes, replicate them without adding much apart from the brand. This had worked for the brand marginally well in the past, enabling them to be in third position of their competitors, but had recently started to tire. TikTok itself had established a new update where ‘reali-tea’ content was preferred by the algorithm.

B) Community engagement. Growing closer to our audience, responding to commenters. Getting to know the people who do daily shopping vlogs, and making our channel more like the content that our community was actually watching. This paired nicely, I felt, with the new TikTok algorithm request.

While I felt like I had support to experiment, I did not. Results had been dropping since January; I began in April, and the results were not up by May. During the two months where I was trying my best to implement the new strategy, I was encouraged instead to just create more brand memes.

Is copying TikTok trends a strategy?

Bearing in mind 40% of consumers think brands jumping on trends is “embarrassing,” according to Sprout Social, and only 30% said “I think it’s cool”, and taking into consideration the fact that TikTok themselves said they were reducing low-effort meme content, I felt this was a bad move and off strategy. Particularly as our ‘Reali-tea’ content was performing much better than the memes. Sadly though, that was seen as a ‘fluke’. Also as a TikTok user, memes are probably about 3% of the content I actually see nowadays. My assistant confirmed; most of her For You page is usually women ranting about their boyfriends.

The client’s team did not see things this way, though; they encouraged me instead to just ‘be more reactive’ and assured me the meme strategy would work if I managed to always somehow be in the shopping center ready to meme. I only heard: ‘copy other people’s jokes faster‘.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good meme as much as the next person. But copying every meme until one goes viral sounds too close to ‘let’s throw lots of shit at the wall and see what sticks’. I began to think, ‘but what about the people who actually follow this shopping center because they love it, and want to see…. cool stuff that they want to buy’ rather than a marketing assistant ‘being a legend’? This may all sound reasonable to you as I say it now, but at the time, directing this to the new executive who acted like I was just some idiot who didn’t watch enough TikTok, I felt like I was losing my mind.

I began to feel like a joke whenever I would talk about marketing strategy, and the lack of congruence became impossible to bear. After the MD gave me an opportunity for a ‘managed exit ‘, I acquiesced immediately, which I’m sure they were secretly pleased about too.

Whilst I was working in the shopping center, I became familiar with fast fashion and heard influencers say things like ‘Polkadots are a trend now’ as if that would make polkadots more culturally important or desirable. The very fact that polkadots are mass market makes them ‘cool’. Is that how coolness works these days? Obviously, I am being facetious; being mass market, something trending on TikTok does not make it ‘culture’. But it made me realize that I belong in luxury, taste-making, meaning-making culture. Not ‘what is Hayley Bieber doing right now?’ culture. I don’t understand ‘lets do what everyone else is doing’ marketing, and they were right to critique me for it.

To meme = to be young and cool?

A Sprout Social report notes that while almost all customers think it’s important for brands to be tuned into online culture, “joining online culture ≠ jumping on a revolving door of trends”. Chasing every meme or trending audio often makes brands look out of touch rather than relevant.

In the Kantar BrandZ report, creative strategist Rachel Lowenstein explicitly calls out this trend-chasing habit:

“Very few brands understand their role in culture. So many of them are chasing fleeting trends, and a trend does not equal culture.”

Kantar adds that tactics like borrowing trending TikTok audio or jumping on memes “may drive fleeting visibility, but they rarely translate into long-term brand impact” or build true cultural capital.

There are plenty of brands that influence culture without recreating every meme under the sun: A24, Sephora, Bershka, KFC, Liquid Death, PopMart. In fact, most successful brands at this point. Even Duolingo and Ryanair have moved on.

I get why people are still jumping on as many social media trends as possible

Trends are easy enough because the brand doesn’t have to create interest itself. It borrows an existing piece of recognition and briefly places itself inside it.

The brand doesn’t have to create that interest itself. It borrows an existing piece of cultural recognition and briefly places its product inside it. But the brand doesn’t own the joke, the format or the sound. By the time the brand has joined, thousands of people may already have made an identical version, even if they ‘hopped on early’.

This is why trend participation can generate visibility while adding very little to the brand.

People remember the trend but not who posted it. Or they remember seeing five brands do it and can no longer distinguish which version belonged to who. There’s also an easy enough internal process, no one is really having to create. Little judgment and taste are being used because the trend has already verified itself as being culturally important merely because it is the number 1 trend on TikTok.

Being obsessed with trends is an obsession with certainty. If everyone else is doing something, it feels safer. If the other shopping center did it and it went viral, but ours didn’t, we just got unlucky. The joke has been approved already. No creative vulnerability was risked.

We appear to be participating in culture, but it’s hollow and lifeless. It has all the correct signs of currency, but none of the meaning that made those things interesting in the first place.

Relevance is much bigger than pop culture

Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer Special Report provides another useful correction.

When it measured what makes a brand feel relevant, pop-culture fluency was only one of five dimensions.

Globally:

• 85% said utility could make a brand relevant.
• 81% cited identity reflection.
• 77% cited community connection.
• 76% cited emotional resonance.
• 67% cited pop-culture fluency.

Pop culture mattered, but it was the lowest-ranking of the five areas. Solving a problem, reflecting identity, connecting them to others, or creating emotional responses was more important. Yet there is no strategy we can copy to achieve that.

Marketing can know every trending sound and still understand very little about its customer’s identity, fears, ambitions, status, belonging or emotional life.

Edelman also found significant gaps between what would make brands relevant and how well consumers believe brands currently deliver it. The biggest gap among more insular consumers was in identity reflection, not pop-culture fluency.

That should change the questions marketers ask.

Not simply:

What are people watching right now?

But:

What are people nostaglic for? What feels socially risky right now? What kind of person are our customers trying to appear to be? Which forms of status are gaining and losing value? What feels like belonging? What feels exclusive? What are people pretending to enjoy?

It’s slightly more complicated than ‘we need to attract Gen Z, and they like TikTok’. Speak to any young person, and ask which groups of other Gen Z they think are uncool, and you’ll find that age demographics are only helpful up to a point.

What reading culture actually looks like

In modern times we’ve seen a rise in low production, extremely feminine aesthetics, regional heritage, de-influencing and frustration with overconsumption. A good marketer will be able to tell you why that’s happening, and guess what’s happening next. And if they simply tell you to copy it, with no understanding of where it comes from, then they are a polka-dot-wearing copycat.

The strategist’s job is to interpret the emotional and symbolic system producing it. Then the brand has to decide what, if anything, that shift means commercially.

It’s hard to stick to your guns sometimes. Especially when a huge client comes along. But I’m glad I had this experience because it allowed me to recognize the difference between a good-fit and a bad-fit client better. I enjoy meaning and craft. Niche perfumeries, high-end streetwear, fashion magazines, and luxury architects. I don’t need to desperately try and jam a personality into a mass market product.

I hope that it’s helped you stick to your guns too, and that you can fend off whoever may be telling you that you need to be ‘more reactive’ instead of thoughtful. More like Ryanair, instead of more like yourself.

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References

Sprout Social. The 2025 Sprout Social Index: UK Edition, pp. 3–4. See also Sprout Social’s global Index findings on culture and trend participation.

Kantar BrandZ. 2026 Most Valuable Global Brands Report, “More Than Just a Moment: The Long Game of Cultural Capital”, pp. 37–44.

Edelman. 2026 Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Growth in an Insular World, pp. 18–20.

Deloitte Digital. 2025 State of Social Research: How Efficiency Can Meet Impact with the Right Investments.

Morley, Nicki. “Why Salience Is Not Enough.” Kantar, 16 October 2025.