Every trend deck has at least one slide of TikToks that went viral for all the wrong reasons. Social listening used to be one of the sharpest tools in a strategists tool kit; however, the elevated engagement that always comes from jumping on a trend has created a world where brands will jump on just about anything. In reality, not all trends are universal. Audiences are smart enough to know when they’re being baited for engagement, so in 2026 brands need to be all the more cautious when tapping into culture.
Our guest writer for this week’s Growth Byte, Mara Dettmann, has been tracking this development closely and has broken down the three ways brands misread culture and what questions they should ask themselves before jumping on a trend.
Check out her Substack, In Interesting Times, for criticisms and observations on all things strategy, culture, and business.
“Sometimes it’s just one weirdo with a bad take – stop creating these artificial rounds of discourse.”
And yet: provided that the take is talkable enough, that one weirdo can go extremely viral.
TikTok creator SpecsStudios parodied this in late August with “Upside Down Pot Girl,” manufacturing a fake discourse from scratch. The joke worked because the format was instantly recognizable: once enough people respond seriously enough to an absurd controversy, it becomes a phenomenon in its own right (think: iced coffee at job interview conversation).
And there’s another complication: even real trends aren’t necessarily as universal as they look.
Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick has been writing about this as the rise of multiple mainstreams: “a cultural multiverse where ‘the most popular thing’ isn’t actually “the most popular thing” but a victor of one of many culture streams.”
Basically, there are three easy ways to misread culture today:
Sometimes one person looks like a whole trend (but isn’t)
Sometimes a real trend looks universal (but isn’t)
Sometimes a real trend looks smaller than it is (but it’s huge somewhere you’re not looking)
So how did we get here?
For a brief time, social media made culture unusually easy to interpret
Before social media, marketers relied on trend analysts to help them tap into audience behaviors, who in turn relied on specialist commissioned research.
From the late 2000s onward, marketers realized they had another source: millions of people voluntarily documenting ALL their behaviors and opinions in public, for free, on social media.
Brands jumped on opportunities to keep track: In 2010, Gatorade launched its “Mission Control” to monitor real-time online conversations; more brands (and dedicated social listening providers) followed suit.
For a while, this worked pretty well. In 2014, KFC Singapore brought back its Cheesy BBQ Meltz in response to social pleas, while the Tesco TikTok campaign Voice of the Checkout grew directly out of the online love for the brand’s phrase “Clubcard accepted.”
And brands didn’t just respond to online conversations about themselves: they also watched culture form to see where they could play a role. Think: Dove channeling the viral conversation around TikTok’s Bold Glamour filter into the campaign #TurnYourBack.
That’s increasingly hard to replicate.
As the internet got louder, people got quieter.
In the UK alone, the share of adult social-media users who publicly post and comment fell from 61% in 2024 to 49% in 2026. Instagram, meanwhile, said in late 2025 that most users are now sharing photos and videos by DM.
So who’s still posting publicly? Unscientifically, it looks like:
Creators who understand engagement
People who spend a lot of time online because they struggle to make IRL connections (often due to specific personality traits, as TikToker Alexia says)
Brands
And WHAT they’re posting includes a lot of slop – not just AI, though a 2025 analysis of TikTok search results found synthetic AI imagery in a quarter of the top results.
Even comments aren’t a safe space: “culture lives in the comment section” still holds some truth, but comments are now mostly a place for social users (including ample brands) to farm engagement.
None of this makes social listening useless – but it does change how we should think about it.
The public internet still gives us an extraordinary view of culture, but it’s a skewed version of real life. And brands need to dig deeper before they turn the latest discourse into a cultural insight.
Does the behavior appear independently across different communities?
Does search or behavioral data support it?
Are ordinary people discussing it, or are creators mostly responding to one another?
Basically: Is this actually a trend, or just one person’s extremely successful piece of engagement bait?
And even if it was just engagement bait, learn from it: why did it work, and what does that say about what resonates with us? Because trends come and go, but the underlying human emotions and drivers are evergreen.
If you’re reading this and are a Substack writer, strategist or journalist yourself, feel free to shoot us a message if you’re interested in guest writing a Growth Byte.
