By the time we've noticed the trend, it's probably over.
Not over in the sense that nobody's doing it anymore. Over in the sense that the early adopters have moved on, and all that's left is the middle market fighting for scraps.
Haven’t we all seen this happen with every social media platform. Someone creates something genuine. It spreads. People notice. Brands notice. Brands hire agencies. Agencies create processes. Processes become playbooks. Playbooks become best practices. And by the time the brand launches its carefully-planned version, the people who made the trend matter are already somewhere else.
Remember when brands discovered TikTok? Around 2020, every marketing team suddenly decided they needed a TikTok strategy. Consultants were hired. Budgets allocated. Agencies pitched "authentic" content strategies. Six months of approvals later, the content launched. It looked exactly like advertising trying to be TikTok. Because it was.
Meanwhile, the actual TikTok culture had moved on. New formats. New sounds. New in-jokes. The brands were dancing to yesterday's music.
Or Clubhouse in 2021. For about four months, it was everywhere. Brands scrambled to create rooms, host conversations, establish presence. By the time most brands launched their Clubhouse strategy, the early adopters had already left. The app that was valued at $4 billion in April was largely abandoned by December. The brands that invested heavily looked desperate rather than relevant.
Or think about brand purpose. For a brief moment in the mid-2010s, purpose felt fresh. Patagonia meant it. TOMS meant it. Then every brand decided they needed purpose too. Now we have insurance companies pretending to care about climate change and fast fashion brands lecturing us about sustainability. The trend isn't dead. It's just exhausted.
Trends are trend-shaped holes that get noticed after someone has already filled them. By the time we arrive, we're not joining the trend. We're copying it.
So what do we do instead? Ignore trends and focus on truths. Because trends change. Truths don't.
People want to be entertained. Truth. People want to feel smart. Truth. People want to belong. Truth.
Truth has a longer half-life than trend.