How are brands taking the campaign these days?
Brands increasingly use trends to make their communication feel timely, relevant, and connected to what people are already talking about. A trend can be anything from a viral meme, song, movie, sporting event, celebrity moment, social-media format, cultural conversation, or changing consumer behaviour.
The basic process is usually Trend → Brand relevance → Creative idea → Content → Distribution → Engagement. For example, if a particular movie becomes popular, a snack brand might connect itself to the movie-night conversation through social media content, a limited-edition product, influencer collaborations, or even special packaging. Brands also use formats and behaviours that are trending on platforms, such as POV videos, GRWM, reaction content, challenges, or user-generated content, but the strongest campaigns don’t simply copy the trend—they find a natural connection between the trend and the brand.
This is often called trendjacking or moment marketing, where a brand quickly enters an existing cultural conversation with its own point of view. For instance, brands like Zomato and Durex are known for leveraging topical moments and internet culture to create timely social media content. Another strong example is Spotify Wrapped, where Spotify takes users’ existing listening behaviour and turns it into personalised, highly shareable content, creating a cultural moment that people themselves spread on social media.
The key difference between simply using a trend and creating a trend-based campaign is the depth of the idea: a simple approach might be a brand posting one meme about something viral, while a stronger campaign identifies why people care about the trend, connects that insight to the brand, and builds multiple touchpoints such as social content, influencers, UGC, outdoor advertising, products, events, or experiences. So, when marketers see a trend, they generally ask:
Is this relevant to our audience? Does it fit our brand personality? Can we add something meaningful or entertaining? Is the timing right? And can we turn this moment into a bigger idea? For example, if “morning routine” videos are trending, a coffee brand shouldn’t simply say “Start your morning with our coffee”; instead, it could build an idea around “The First Sip”, encouraging creators and consumers to show the first few moments of their morning and make the brand’s coffee part of that ritual. In short, a trend gives the brand the cultural context, while the brand’s insight, personality, and creative idea turn that trend into a campaign.
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