Somewhere along the way, marketing teams started doing the same thing. They confused cultural participation with strategic positioning. The confusion is understandable. The dashboards reward it. A trend post outperforms a brand post most weeks of the year, and the team that posts the trend looks responsive, current, and alive. The team that doesn’t look like it missed something.<br />
"Hi, it's Mon. Give me a call, I have exciting news for you, you're going to love this. Bye!"
Monica, a friend of mine who is constantly redefining herself. She is a new person every two weeks, it feels like. After I got that message, I called her, and she launched into a rant about society and anger, the division of the country, and gave me the bottom line: gut bacteria. She has come to the conclusion that all our problems, I mean all our problems, political, social, economical, everything, can be solved by healthy gut bacteria or microbials or Chex mix, I have no idea because in the midst of this lecture on what will save us, I was suddenly confused with the last lecture on cold water plunges and the one before that on hot spring baths and on it goes.
Monica follows trends. She doesn't just follow them; she immerses herself completely and fully. She’s all about whatever new trend will save us, heal us, and bring us peace sans farts. This is just the latest iteration of who she is and what she stands for. I listen, tell her it's great, and wait for the next missive telling me about naked spelunking or pure bamboo enemas. Her current obsession will change in a few weeks, and if I bring it up, she'll bat it away, say it was a whim, but this time, this time it's the real deal.
She is like many, many consumers who spend way too much time on social media. She is also searching for something. What, I have no idea. But her searches lead her down many paths, and she freely shares her journeys with me.
Always changing, but committing one hundred percent. She's like a new brand trying to find its voice or purpose. She is all in on cultural participation.
Somewhere along the way, marketing teams started doing the same thing. They confused cultural participation with strategic positioning.
The confusion is understandable. The dashboards reward it. A trend post outperforms a brand post most weeks of the year, and the team that posts the trend looks responsive, current, and alive. The team that doesn’t look like it missed something. So the meeting ends with a decision to participate, and the participation works, in the sense that the numbers go up.
The numbers always go up. That’s the problem.
What the dashboard measures, and what it does not
A brand is not built by the things people see. It is built on the things people remember. Those aren’t in the same category. A trend post produces visibility, which is a metric. It produces almost no memory of the brand that posted it, which is the actual asset. The audience laughs at the joke and scrolls. A week later, they can recall the joke and not the company. A month later, they cannot recall either, but the company has moved on to the next one, and the cycle continues.
Visibility is easy to measure because the platforms hand it to you. Impressions, reach, view-through, engagement rate. These numbers exist because they can be counted. Brand memory is harder to measure because it lives inside someone's head, surfaces unpredictably, and shows up months or years later in a purchase decision the marketing team will never trace back to a specific post. Most companies do not run the studies that would surface it. So the thing that compounds slowly and matters most is invisible to the people in charge of the budget, and the thing that flashes briefly and matters least is the thing on their screen all day.
A team that optimizes for what it can see will, over time, become very good at producing what it can see and very bad at producing what it cannot. This is not a failure of the team. It is a failure of the instruments. But the result is the same: the brand spends a decade getting more visible and less memorable, and no one notices until the budget runs out and the audience cannot remember why they were supposed to care.
The first thing to go is the voice
What gets eroded in that cycle is harder to see on a dashboard. Tonal consistency goes first. A brand that adopts whatever voice the platform is running this week stops having a voice of its own. The audience learns to associate the brand with the platform's mood rather than with a position the brand actually holds. The brand becomes a costume that changes weekly. Costumes do not compound.
There is a specific texture to this drift. A brand starts the year with a tone document, an approved style guide, and a sense of its voice. Then a trend lands, and the team adapts the voice for that post because the trend has a register, and the brand voice would feel out of place in it. The next trend asks for a different register. The team adapts again. Each adaptation is small. Each one is defensible. But six months in, the brand voice document has been overwritten by a hundred small accommodations, and what is left is a brand that sounds like the platform rather than itself. The audience cannot point to the moment it happened. Neither can the team. But the brand has become a vessel for whatever cultural mood is moving through the algorithm, and the original voice is gone.
This matters because a voice is what allows a brand to be recognized in fragments. If the brand has a real voice, a single line of copy on a billboard, a fifteen-second ad, or a tweet, all carry the same signature. The audience doesn't need to see the logo to know who is speaking. Once the voice goes, the brand needs the logo every time. It has lost the ability to be recognized in pieces. Every dollar of media now buys less.
Then comes the drift in what the brand is for
Then comes strategic drift. Reactive marketing slowly replaces deliberate positioning, because deliberate positioning is slow and unsexy and does not produce the dopamine of a viral repost. The team that was supposed to be building a category presence ends up running a meme account that happens to share a logo with a real business. The two are not the same thing, but the meme account is louder, so the meme account wins the calendar.
The drift is also visible in the meeting itself. Trend-chasing changes what kind of work feels productive. A campaign that takes six weeks to develop and tests an actual position gets compared, in the room, to a post the social manager wrote in twenty minutes that pulled five million views. The campaign loses. The comparison was structured to make it lose. Over time, the team stops proposing the six-week work. Stops thinking in those time horizons at all. The work that remains is the work that fits into a day. The work that builds a brand does not fit into a day, and it stops being done.
A category presence is the accumulation of consistent positioning over years. It is what a buyer remembers about the brand when no marketing is in front of them. It is built by repeating the same true thing in different forms until the audience can complete the sentence themselves. None of that is compatible with a team whose week is structured around reacting to whatever the internet is doing this morning.
The most expensive version is the one that hides best
The deeper cost is that the brand starts sounding culturally fluent and strategically hollow. This is the version that hides best, because the writing is good. The copy is sharp. The references are current. A casual observer would call the brand sophisticated. But there is no position inside the fluency. Pull away the topical hook, and there is nothing the brand actually believes that a competitor does not also believe. The category collapses into a shared register where every brand sounds like a friend group at a party. The friend group is real. The brands inside it are interchangeable.
This is the worst version because it cannot be diagnosed by looking at the work. The work looks fine. The work might even be winning awards. But the cumulative effect on the audience is that they cannot tell the brands apart anymore. They liked the post. They do not remember whose post it was. They like the brand. They do not know what the brand is for. They will buy whichever competitor shows up at the moment of purchase, because no preference has been built underneath the fluency.
A category in this condition gets disrupted easily, because the disruptor only needs to do one thing: hold a position long enough for the audience to notice it. The incumbents cannot respond because they no longer have positions of their own to defend. They have voices, references, and content calendars. They have everything except the thing that would have allowed them to fight.
Why some brands resist
This is why the strongest brands tend to look slightly behind. Luxury brands resist over-participation because they understand the math. Every trend they join lowers the price of being them. They keep their identity expensive on purpose. The cost of admission to their world is the willingness to be patient with them. That patience is the asset.
The principle is not about price tier. A regional grocery chain can hold a consistent identity through cultural noise. A direct-to-consumer mattress company can lose its identity inside it. Category and budget are not the deciding factors. The deciding factor is whether the brand has a position worth repeating, and the discipline to repeat it when repetition feels boring to the people doing it.
Repetition almost always feels boring to the people doing it. That is one of the harder truths in this work. The team running the brand is exposed to its own messaging at a volume the audience will never approach. By the time the team is tired of the message, the audience is starting to remember it. The trend post relieves the team's boredom. It does nothing for the audience's memory.
The brands that hold their identity tend to have one of two things going for them. Either someone senior in the building has the authority and the conviction to refuse trend participation when it does not serve the position, or the brand has institutional rituals that make trend-chasing structurally difficult. Both are forms of friction. Friction is what protects the brand from the team's own restlessness.
What this requires of the team
Algorithms reward frequency. Brands are built through clarity and repetition. These two facts are in tension, and they will continue to be. The teams that win the next decade will be the ones who learn to feed the algorithm without letting the algorithm rewrite the brand. That requires knowing what the brand is for and what it would rather lose this week's visibility to protect. It is a different job than running a content calendar, and most teams are not staffed for it.
The skill is not refusing every trend. That posture produces brands that look stiff and out of touch, which is its own kind of failure. The skill is being able to tell, in the meeting, the difference between a trend that the brand can join while remaining itself and a trend that requires the brand to become something else to participate. Some trends are wearable. Some trends are costumes. A team that cannot tell them apart will end up in a costume every time, because every trend looks wearable from inside the urgency of the moment.
The discipline is upstream of the calendar. It lives in how the brand has defined itself, how clearly the team can articulate the position out loud, and how confidently the senior people will defend it when something culturally hot rolls through. A team that can answer the question what does this brand refuse to do will hold up under cultural pressure. A team that cannot will drift, and the drift will look like responsiveness for a while, and then it will look like nothing at all.
The Takeaway
Attention can be rented through trends. Brand equity cannot.
The brands that survive cultural volatility are usually the ones disciplined enough not to react to every wave. They are the ones who have done the upstream work. Figured out what they stand for. Written it down in a way that is actually defensible. Built the internal authority to say no to the trends that would dilute it.
This is the work ThoughtLab is built to do. Not the trend post. The position underneath it. We help companies do the harder, slower, less immediately gratifying work of building a brand that compounds. One that the audience remembers. One that the team can defend. One that does not need to chase the algorithm because it has already done the work of being recognizable on its own terms.
A brand built that way does not need to win every week. It needs to be recognizable, in fragments, across a decade. That is the asset trend-chasing erodes. And it is the asset we exist to help our clients protect.
