With Taylor Swift's announcement of her engagement comes the inevitable onslaught of social media responses from brands.
We saw it even a few weeks ago new album with The Life of a Showgirl, orange-ification trend. Brands were chasing the bandwagon with alacrity to align themselves with the popular chanteuse through liberal use of the album artwork's color palette. To be fair, among Swift's distinctive brand assets, color is an easy hook; a simple switch of shade can show you're on the ball as a brand. There have been some good examples (FedEx, Dunkin'), and many lazy and not very funny executions.
The good news is that brands with high cultural relevance grow six times faster than brands with low cultural relevance, according to our data at Kantar. But if everyone's doing the same thing, can it really be moving the needle for every brand? No, to be effective, if you are going to jump feet first on to a bandwagon, it has to connect with your brand strategy.
So how can brands stand out when every other brand is talking about everything all of the time, and constantly looking to align with the latest cultural phenomena? Any brand can knock out quick and tactical social media content, helped by handy graphic or Gen AI tools. So what hope is there for brands to differentiate themselves?
It reminds me of one of my favorite Dorothy Parker quotes: "There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words."
You might have the best wisecracker or nimblest social media manager going, but if what you're doing doesn't fit with your brand personality or customer experience, it will be an unconvincing play and won't drive long-term growth.
Bandwagon-ism is nothing new. I spoke on BBC Breakfast last year about the Bridgerton Effect, Wimbledon and what brands do to ride the coattails of these cultural moments, both in officially licenced ways and unofficial nods too. Cultural alignment can mean anything from TikTok trends to huge music and entertainment events, right through to official sponsorship of sporting events and all the halo opportunities that brings. In case you're unaware, next summer sees a large global men's football event that brand sponsors have already started communicating about.
But marketing is way more than adopting others' distinctive brand assets to show that you're on the pulse.
Sure, you could turn your brand orange or make a lazy Taylor Swift engagement pun, but the margins are in understanding your brand's meaningful difference and knowing how to talk about it.
We can choose to live on our wits, constantly searching for and responding to the next trending ephemera. But we also need to make sure we know what we're doing with it, and make sure the culture of your brand is endemic. Is the culture you're appropriating brand appropriate, or is it something you want to co-create (rather than an existing phenomenon)?
We move seamlessly from brat summer to Colin the Caterpillar cake wars to Taylor Swift's new album - it's relentless. So, for brands, taking a step back is a good idea and allows space to develop a strategy that ties in with their brand-specific meaning and difference and desired associations.
Culture is a serious undertaking, even if it comes alive as wit, and should be carried out with thought, as well as with agility. For marketers, whose main challenge is to grow their brand, they need to be sure that the small interventions all add up to being effective use of resources. To grow, brands must be meaningfully different to more people, and they must manifest that through appropriate content.
Jumping on the culture bandwagon is equivalent to wearing a ton of badges signalling your allegiance to personalities or causes, so make sure you're choosing the right badges, or engaging with (geddit?) the right trends.