When it comes to chasing a trend, you should not be doing it because your competitor did it. It would mean you are repainting your house because your neighbour did it.
It is important to ask yourself: Will this help the brand? Will it help communicate the problem the brand solves? Will it get me a new audience? Should I really be pitching this microdrama?
Every brand aspires to create a campaign that gets into the reference deck. Because if your campaign or creative has made it into a sentence like, “let’s create something like (insert food delivery service which every marketer has wanted to create like for the past 5 years)”, your brand is immortal. It has been etched into history. Its tales will long be sung in boardrooms, pitch decks, or brought up as an example when the brief is not briefing enough.
While this is the goal, there are like in anything in life, side quests. For us marketers, these come in the form of ‘trends’.
To understand this, you might need to take a step back and seriously ask yourself a question – which is the last trending post you remember?
If you are Indian and above the age of 26, you might recall the legendary milk & milk products brand with the girl who does their commentary. The masters of the trending format. Long envied by people in the marketing world, with questions like, “how do they do that?”, “did they really get a hoarding up that fast?!”, “maybe they have a time machine”—amongst the wows and giggles they got.
So when creation became decentralised, it was obvious that marketers would want to recreate it and tip their hat to a brand that might have got them interested in advertising.
But the problem is when trending becomes a format.
It started with Twitter, under the ‘trending hashtag’. The audience was there. A topic was trending – so why not crack a joke on it? What’s the harm?
The audience did indulge the marketers’ dream for a bit and they still do on other platforms. It might get you a like or a chuckle for a fleeting moment. But that is what it will be – a fleeting moment.
But will it get you an organic share? Yes I am talking about the all-so-sacred organic share, where your audience willingly partakes in sharing a creative made with blood, sweat, and intern tears? The action by the audience that gets the hair on the back of your neck all excited.
Probably not.
It’s easy to critique this, but it is equally difficult to create a campaign that holds its own with the audience. Where an insight translates into a campaign that just sticks with people across ages, geographies, and political ideologies.
(Let’s imagine for a bit.)
A male in his 30s is brushing his teeth. He feels a sudden pain.
“Aaah,” he goes.
The door suddenly opens – a reporter and a cameraman have entered his bathroom.
(End imagination.)
Now, I need not write the next dialogue or mention the brand. It has somehow created a moment that has gotten hardwired in our brains. Till date, I have never used that particular salt-based toothpaste. I bet many of us haven’t. But is it iconic? Definitely.
Will I be opposed to trying it if someone offers it to me one morning? Not at all.
Will I be shocked if a reporter barges into my bathroom? Still a yes.
Now, this is at a mass scale, the epitome of advertising. But not every brand gets a chance to shine like that. And to get to this stage, a brand must endure to find its voice. It is not something that will happen overnight. It is a process of creating, deleting, and recreating again and again.
There will be trials and errors, hits and misses. But every miss teaches you what you should not be doing. Because when you are in the moment of creating a trend, it won’t seem extraordinary—it might just feel like something obvious your brand should be doing.
Brands over the years have created plenty of trends—the most famous one being the engagement ring. The tales of which are passed on from generation to generation via the great CMFBR of LinkedIn.
If you wear a sparkling white shirt, a famous detergent brand starting with T is bound to come up. And like any good marketing campaign, these brands understood their audience, got their insight right, and most importantly – they were brave.
They did not have a reference. They are the reference.
They invested in creating, trusted their research, and backed their creativity to tell their tale. Sure, some might have pushed it too far with the ‘fake dead celebrity prank’. But now, because of their efforts, we have a reference of what we shouldn’t be doing.
So, here’s to creating and hoping that your campaign becomes a reference (for the right reasons).
