Chasing Trends Makes Your Brand Basic and Forgettable

When the Coldplay kiss cam incident went viral in 2025, brands jumped on it almost immediately. Duolingo, IKEA Singapore, Nando’s, Hulu, GlobeAir and plenty of others found a way to turn the moment into content. Some of it was clever. Some of it was funny. Some of it got a lot of attention.

Then the internet moved on.

That doesn’t mean those brands made a mistake. My problem isn’t with using trends. My problem is when a brand becomes dependent on them.

If every week your marketing is built around whatever meme, format, visual style or topic is popular right now, eventually your brand starts looking like everyone else participating in the exact same trend.

You might get attention. But attention and identity are not the same thing.

Trends Can Work. That’s Not the Argument.

I don’t buy the idea that brands should never touch trends. That’s too simplistic.

A 2025 study of 952 U.S. Facebook and TikTok users found that perceived trendiness in branded memes was associated with purchase intention, with a stronger relationship among TikTok users. So yes, being current can help.

But that still doesn’t make trend chasing a brand strategy.

A trend can help distribute an idea. It can give you a format people already understand. It can make your content feel current. What it can’t do for you is answer a much bigger question: why should anyone remember you after the trend is dead?

That’s where a lot of brands get lazy.

They borrow the joke. They borrow the format. They borrow the aesthetic. They borrow the language. Then they confuse the attention that comes with the trend for attention toward the brand itself.

Those are two different things.

I’ve Seen What Borrowed Relevance Looks Like

Before I became a designer, I was a club promoter for Latin venues in Houston.

At one point, there wasn’t a Latin club in Houston I couldn’t walk into and get priority treatment. I knew the people. They knew me. I was active in that world, and being active in that world gave me a certain level of relevance inside of it.

I eventually left.

Now, more than a decade later, I can walk into those same types of venues and wait like everyone else. That isn’t surprising. I left that environment, the scene kept moving, new people came in, and my relevance faded with it.

That’s how I look at brands that build too much of their identity around what’s currently popular.

The attention is real. The relevance can be real. But if that relevance is borrowed from something outside the brand, it can disappear as quickly as it showed up.

If the Trend Disappears, What’s Left?

A strong brand should have things people can recognize and remember without needing whatever is popular that week to prop it up.

That could be your point of view, your voice, your visual identity, your product, the way you present information, your standards, your customer experience, or ideally some combination of those things.

Before I would jump on a trend, I’d ask four questions:

• Does this actually make sense coming from us?
• If the trend disappeared tomorrow, would there still be an idea here?
• What does someone learn about our brand from this besides the fact that we’re online?
• Are we doing this because it fits us, or because everyone else is doing it?

If the only reason the content works is because people recognize the meme, you need to be careful about what they’re actually remembering.

They may remember the joke and forget who posted it.

Constant Trend Chasing Puts You on a Treadmill

The other problem is operational.

Trends move fast. The joke that’s everywhere today can already feel old by next week. If your content strategy depends on constantly reacting to whatever the internet decides is interesting, you’re giving the internet control over what your brand talks about.

That gets exhausting, but the bigger problem is that it makes the brand reactive.

Instead of deciding what you want to be known for and finding interesting ways to talk about it, you’re waiting for the next trend to hand you something to say.

That’s backwards.

Your brand should tell you how to use a trend. A trend shouldn’t tell you how to act like a brand.

A Laugh Isn’t the Same Thing as a Reason to Buy

This is where vanity metrics can make the whole thing worse.

A trendy post gets 100,000 views. Great. What did those views actually do?

Maybe awareness was the goal, and in that case the post might have done exactly what it needed to do. But if your goal was to make people understand what you sell, remember what makes you different, trust the business, or eventually buy something, views alone don’t answer any of those questions.

I see too many people treat attention as the finish line.

It’s not.

Attention gives you a chance to say something. The brand still has to give people something worth remembering.

Timeless Doesn’t Mean Boring

When I say I would rather build something more timeless, I don’t mean your brand should freeze itself in place and ignore culture.

Brands should evolve. Visual systems evolve. Language evolves. Platforms change. Humor changes. Customer expectations change.

The difference is whether you’re evolving from a clear identity or replacing your identity every time something new gets popular.

A strong brand can use trends without becoming one.

That’s the standard I would use.

Look at your last 20 pieces of content and remove the logo from them. Do they still feel like they came from the same company? Do they sound like the same company? Is there a consistent point of view underneath the different formats?

If not, I wouldn’t solve that by posting more.

I’d solve the brand first.

And if you need help figuring out what that brand should actually look and sound like before you keep feeding the content machine, schedule a call with me and my team at Desque.