Method to the Meme Madness: On the Current Renaissance of Brand-Centered Trends
How marketers learned to stop worrying and love the chaos
2023 has been a chaotic year for culture, but a great year for cultural marketing. Between the Barbie movie and the Grimace shake, brand-centered trends enjoyed a renaissance; two of the biggest pop stars to walk the earth (speaking of Renaissance) launched global tours with an economic impact so strong the Federal Reserve felt compelled to comment on it; and for a brief, beautiful week, the vacuum left by Elon Musk’s desecration of Twitter seemed likely to be filled with a new text-based social feed, brand-safe and ready for experimentation.
At the same time, the churn of viral trends is moving faster than ever. Hands were wrung over blueberry milk nails, Pinkydoll, and Skibidi Toilet. Memes — our means of showing we’ve digested and understood a topic, and the best indication that a certain event, digital or otherwise, is important — became ever more layered, a web of references requiring a deep understanding of the zeitgeist to untangle. Being so chronically online that you can comprehend a sentence like “Subwaysessions was milkshake ducked”¹ brings to mind this infamous tweet:
…so much so that the allure of logging off, of touching grass, has grown more powerful. There’s too much information; it’s not only rotting our minds, it’s helping kill the planet.
If organic cultural trends are this hard for a single person to follow, brands are put in an even more challenging position. Brands are not people, no matter how hard they work to foster a coherent brand persona; online audiences are savvy, keenly aware that the ultimate goal of a brand’s participation in culture is to sell something back to them, and thus expectations are higher. At best, a brand’s haphazard handling of a cultural trend will be ignored; at worst, it will be ridiculed.
Still, marketers know the importance of being culturally relevant, and that nowadays, being culturally relevant on a day-to-day basis means that they cannot fully ignore digital trends. In fact, pop culture has become so driven by digital trends and social media discourse that it’d be negligent for a brand to completely ignore them. Thus, brand marketers have soldiered on, doing their best to keep up with an increasingly fragmented social landscape and ever-accelerating trend cycles. And luckily, this might just be the best year yet for brand-centered fads and trends.
Offline actions spur mainstream trends
Because most culture pops are bottom up, borne out of connected communities, the fragmentation of social media means there’s less connective tissues for mass culture, making it much harder to keep track of trends. That said, some trends do break through, and capture cross-platform attention, especially when these digital-native trends encourage offline group actions — Consider the Barbie movie, and more broadly, the sensation that was Barbenheimer.
While Barbie was inevitably going to be a marketing success (remember the hype around the “paparazzi” photos of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling a full year before the movie was released?), it took a community of movie lovers noticing a funny contrast — Greta Gerwig’s joyfully saturated and improbably feminist rendering of Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s dark exploration of war and male hubris in Oppenheimer would be released the very same day — to unlock the phenomenon of Barbenheimer. Both films benefited from this unlikely crossover event (though arguably Oppenheimer benefited more from Barbie’s halo) but the trend had true staying power because of both the studios’ and audiences’ willingness to engage with the weirdness.
McDonald’s was also a winner of organic cultural trends this year. As part of an extensive campaign to celebrate its mascot Grimace’s birthday, the chain introduced the limited-time-only Grimace Shake, which quickly found a foothold on TikTok. Creators filmed themselves excitedly trying the shake, moments later cutting to footage where something horrible had happened to them, presumably the fault of the purple milkshake now dribbling from their mouths.
Surely there was a point in time when McDonald’s would have released a statement decrying the trend, as brands tend to do when absurdist gen z humor breaches their parents’ media bubble. There’s also an alternate reality where McDonald’s embraced the trend a little too much, distracting from the creativity and fun of the organic #GrimaceShake content with unwanted corporate noise. Instead, McDonald’s chose a middle road: per Guillaume Huin, McDonald’s Head of Social Media, the brand “decided to show our fans that we see them and their creativity in a sweet, candid and genuine way, as Grimace would… without repeating what they said to show you agree with them and stealing their thunder.” McDonald’s accomplished this with a straightforward tweet that acknowledged the trend but didn’t engage with it outright, ensuring that their participation did not distract from the organic content (thus also ensuring the trend’s continued relevance). As of writing this, #GrimaceShake has 3.4 billion views on TikTok.
Simply put, Barbenheimer and the Grimace Shake were true gifts to the marketers at Mattel and McDonald’s. Organic trends centering brands are nearly impossible to force, and when they do occur, they’re difficult to make last, as brands jumping onto a trend is often a sign that it’s passé. This is driven by the speed at which brands do typically engage with trends; with cultural trends, timing is everything, and a brand with strict guidelines and lengthy legal approvals is not really equipped to participate in the conversation as it’s happening.
Lastly, in a section about community-driven trends, I’d be remiss if I did not bring up pickleball here. Many brands have jumped onto the pickleball bandwagon, leaning into the sport’s relative accessibility and mostly friendly nature to engage with their audience’s interests offline (though I’m sure many neighbors, tennis players, and Paddleball Paul disagree with that assessment). Several brands have launched athleisure collections dedicated to the sport. Walmart, for its part, took a different route, partnering with Break the Love, a racket-sports booking platform, to offer comped reservations to its employees and Walmart+ members. This concerted effort from brands to spotlight this emerging leisure activity are legitimizing Pickleball as a sport, indicating, once again, that trends that spur offline actions are often conducive to community building. And in today’s fragmented media landscape, there’s nothing more valuable to brand marketers these days than a dedicated community.
A quick response is only half the battle
That said, many brands are getting better at moving at the speed of culture, embracing trends before they reach peak relevance. A great example of this comes from Popeyes, which jumped on the “girl dinner” trend to launch its own girl dinner meal consisting of side dishes typically ordered individually. What made this activation so successful was the sheer speed at which Popeyes executed it: the very first reference to a “girl dinner” was posted on TikTok in May, and by the end of July, Popeyes had a new menu item.
Similarly, Kim Kardashian’s Skims is another brand adept at quickly jumping on the zeitgeist; among other hyper-relevant campaigns, Skims tapped White Lotus season 2 actresses Simona Tabasco and Bea Grannò (aka Mia and Lucia) to star in its Valentine’s Day campaign, which launched mere weeks after the show finale had aired. Skims’ Instagram post announcing the campaign earned more than 45,000 likes (far outperforming its typical benchmark of 2,000 to 6,000).
These two campaigns (from two very different brands!) were each successful not just because of the speed at which they jumped on trends, but because both of the trends they engaged with were clearly aligned with the brands’ ethos. Popeyes took advantage of a nascent food trend; Skims capitalized on the relatable-but-still-aspirational nature of the White Lotus characters’ personalities (coincidentally the same public persona Kim K strives for).
Knowing which trends a brand has a right to engage with and which ones it should sit out is crucial to maximizing cultural relevance. Not trying to engage with every conversation comes across as more authentic; it shows that a brand understands both its niche and its audience, and it goes a long way in terms of fostering a brand’s personality. As such, it’s important that brands pay attention to how they’re being talked about organically, taking cues from their audience to understand when and where it’s appropriate to participate.
Duolingo does this expertly: building on memes about the persistence of Duolingo push notifications, the language app’s social media presence centers around the pushy, oft-unhinged personality of Duo, the brand’s mascot. Duo has parasocial relationships with celebrities. Duo gets dressed up for the Eras tour (and even cries outside of Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn’s Cornelia Street apartment building). While the content has very little to do with the brand’s purpose of teaching you languages, this consistent, irreverent tone of voice has inspired a stan culture around Duo and brought a new audience into the brand’s fold.
Another success story in fostering a consistent personality while engaging with culture pops comes, pleasantly, perhaps unexpectedly, from various public libraries. Among many others, the Milwaukee Public Library has gone viral on TikTok for its interpretation of the platform’s trends, taking popular sounds and formats and applying them to the goings on of a public library. The MPL TikTok account has over 100,000 followers and 3.6 million likes — pretty serious metrics for the social media account of a mid-sized city’s library system. It’s achieved this level of popularity because even when it’s engaging with trends, it remains dedicated to its specific niche and values, celebrating the librarians, books, and community that make a library great.
Popeyes, Skims, Duolingo and the Milwaukee Public Library — four brands that heretofore have likely never been mentioned in the same sentence — get culture pops exactly right. Each understands its niche and has developed a particular tone that resonates with its desired audience. For brands looking to engage with culture pops, the first step in doing so is identifying that niche and tone; from there, it becomes much easier to sift through the thousands of microtrends that arise on social media each day and determine which ones your brand has a right to engage with. Not only will you be able to activate more quickly, but you’ll have more fruitful conversations with your audience.
Hold fast to your brand values
A consistent dedication to brand values is the final piece of the cultural relevance puzzle. Per the 2022 Culture Relevance report by MAGNA, young people are especially likely to see brands as culturally relevant when they show a consistent commitment to a cause (124i), with 52% thinking that it’s important for brands to talk about ongoing social issues to be culturally relevant. Given the volatile political climate and younger audiences’ ability to sniff out inauthentic support for a cause, when a brand does choose to engage with social issues, it’s critical to commit to that cause.
Take, for instance, the Bud Light fiasco: after conducting a very straightforward sponsored post with popular actress and influencer Dylan Mulvaney leading up to the Super Bowl, the light beer found itself on the receiving end of right-wing transphobic backlash. This vocal minority engaged in a coordinated boycott of the brand for simply working with a trans person; rather than defending the partnership and Dylan herself — as would be expected from a brand that had leaned into LGBTQ allyship for decades — Bud Light distanced itself from the actress, with Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth issuing a milquetoast statement claiming that the brand “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.” Naturally, no one was happy with this response, certainly not the LGBTQ community and its allies the brand threw under the bus, nor the enraged transphobes, who merely continued their boycott, addicted to the sound of their own voices. This ordeal shows that, while engaging with social issues is often undesirable for brands given the risk of alienating potential customers, brands in 2023 must pick a lane: you cannot be everything to everyone.
Lucky for us, most cultural trends are not major flashpoints in conservative moral panics (though it never hurts to remember that most of mainstream pop culture starts with Black and queer communities, the very same audiences who those moral panics most often target). Rather, they’re fun, fleeting opportunities to communicate with your audience online. What’s more, committing to your audience’s values and showcasing that commitment doesn’t preclude playful engagement with culture. It is of course very important to get the tone right, showing that you’re not trivializing the issues your audience cares about, but it is possible to strike a balance between seriousness and levity.
Body care brand Billie, for example, launched a campaign to address the sexist double standards women experience in their everyday lives… by creating a spoof infomercial and boardgame, called “No Worries If Not!” (which, for the unfamiliar, is a deliberately passive phrase so many women find themselves using that it’s become a sort of intra-gender inside joke). Billie, which was the first razor brand to show women’s body hair in its ads, balances the deeply frustrating nature of expectations placed on women with the nostalgia and kitsch associated with infomercials and board games. It’s clear that Billie takes the issue of sexism seriously — the brand also partners with female-focused organizations like the YWCA and Black Girls Code — but has created a campaign that also lets its audience laugh at how absurd these standards are in the first place. That approach proved popular, given the board game sold out.
Sustainability is, naturally, a core value for younger audiences, and given the climate crisis is worsening by the day, engaging with sustainability in a conscientious but culturally-relevant way is a difficult balance to get right. A brand that successfully threaded that particular needle is plant-based beverage brand (and certified B Corp) Silk, which, in the midst of particularly lengthy discourse around nepo babies (i.e. nepotism babies, referring to the children of famous people who have succeeded in similar careers, with the implication that their parents’ connections offered them a leg up in that career), tapped several of them for a campaign promoting its Nextmilk product. Among other nepo babies, Sailor Brinkley Cook, Ella Bleu Travolta, and Myles O’Neal — children of Christie, John, and Shaquille, respectively, all of whom at one point posed for the original “Got Milk?” ads — starred in the cross-platform campaign, representing a new generation of consumers who increasingly turn to plant-based alternatives. This campaign was a clever way to participate in the nepo baby conversation while showcasing the benefits of plant-based milk alternatives. Obviously, Silk is not trying to tackle the entirety of the climate crisis with this campaign, but rather engages with the issue in a clever, attention-grabbing way.
While Bud Light offers us a cautionary tale — if you try to please all, you’ll likely please none — Billie and Silk show that it is in fact possible to tackle values-driven marketing in a way that’s culturally relevant. As human beings, no matter how deeply we care about a particular issue, we know it’s unhealthy to be thinking about that issue all the time; we need rest and fun and community alongside our commitment to what we believe in. As brands, we can take a similar approach: meaningfully invest in causes our audiences care about, and then find a lighthearted way to address them.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it turns out that the best method for marketers to deal with the chaos of today’s pop culture is to lean in to your audience and empower them to take actions, especially offline actions that bring people together. That means to know your audience, understand what memes they are sharing, respond quickly and in a consistent tone aligned with your brand image, and stick to your brand values.
Engaging with culture pops was never that serious: understanding your niche and committing meaningfully to your values will help you pinpoint which trends are most relevant for your brand, and when those trends do arise, act quickly and be willing to let creators remix and riff on brand assets. Ultimately, acknowledging that you’re in on the joke without overshadowing the original conversation will help endear your brand to your audience and forge more meaningful connections.
¹ Subwaysessions is a TikTok creator that films videos of her outfits while waiting for the New York City subway. She went viral across various platforms in early August because her outfits are particularly wacky. Milkshake duck, per Know Your Meme, refers to “a viral internet star who is briefly adored by the public prior to the discovery of their distasteful or offensive past.” Subwaysessions, in an interview with The Cut after she went viral, made racist comments about Harlem and Queens, effectively killing the entertaining aspect of the debate around her style. Thus, Subwaysessions was milkshake ducked. Isn’t this fun??
