Set, follow or skip? How brands should navigate micro-trends

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Influencers

13/12/2024

ARTICLE BY

Madeleine Schulz

13.12.2024

Fast-churning micro-trends dominated TikTok in 2023. Should luxury brands play in 2024?

In 2023, clean girl, girl math, Barbiecore, coquette and tomato girl summer dominated our social feeds. This year, these trends have quickly been replaced by mob wife winter, corpcore and loud budgeting. That’s the thing about micro-trends: they’re fleeting.

In this sense, they’re not really micro-trends at all, argues trend forecaster Agustina Panzoni. “When you look at trends, you look at movements that span multiple years and multiple seasons on the micro-side,” she says. “So what has been labelled ‘micro-trends’ are more like ‘internet aesthetics’. They’re pre-packaged styles that you can buy into.”

Where do brands fit in? The new age of internet trends — which are fast moving and often feel randomly generated to anyone not closely following the influencer crowd — has turned the trend cycle on its head.

“Having a point of view on the cultural side will always be a positive,” Panzoni says. “Attaching yourself to a pre-existing aesthetic, maybe not so much.”

Last year, brands dipped in and out of these aesthetics. In August, Ulta and Mac hopped on the girl math trend, while brands including Refy played into tomato girl summer across marketing and campaigns. In December, Loewe encapsulated the overarching “girlhood” trend with a 15-second clip of girls on the streets of New York giving weather advice to a Loewe-clad girl hanging out of a window with the caption “Girlhood #loewe”. In June, Jacquemus hopped on the coquette aesthetic, for its AW24 collection filled with bows — a pivot for the brand, Panzoni says. Since an initial spike mid last year, from November 2023 through January 2024, searches for coquette have seen a sharp uptick, according to Google Trends.

These trends move faster than ever, promoted by TikTok algorithms that collate and regurgitate related content. They provide an interesting opportunity for brands: if they hop on quickly, their content can be pushed wider than ever. But, oftentimes, this engagement feels surface-level, and if not well executed, can quickly feel stale — particularly given the speed at which these trends move.

“It is very difficult for brands to see meaningful results (such as sales) from hopping onto micro-trends within TikTok,” says Amy Still, CEO and founder at media network Whisk, which connects brands and audiences. Typically, brands lack the internal processes to accumulate the speed necessary for identifying and responding to trends, she says. Marketing departments’ layers of approval are a hindrance. “By the time a trend is spotted, an idea developed, approved and executed, the micro-trend has passed.”

There’s success to be had when brands get it right. According to data collected by marketing agency Buttermilk exclusively for Vogue Business, 61.7 per cent of consumers appreciate when brands engage with micro-trends, 22.7 per cent of respondents say they engage with or purchase products based on social media trends “very often”, and 28.9 per cent do so “often”.

In 2024, should brands aim to set trends, jump on them, or skip them entirely?

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From runway to social

To engage or not is a case-by-case decision, experts agree, given how difficult the fleeting nature of micro-trends makes it for brands to engage effectively.

Some hit better than others, Panzoni says. In September, Boss named its entire AW24 collection “corpcore”. “With a theme that [SVP of creative direction Marco] Falcioni dubs ‘corpcore’, the new collection breaks the codes of traditional office attire with contemporary spins on classic staples in men’s and women’s wardrobes, from blazers and suits to shirts and pencil skirts,” the press release read. Back in September, the trend was nascent. Now, this very look is crowding TikTok feeds. The industry is keen to see how this example develops, it being one of the first brands to not only tap into a “core”, but name a collection after one.

For collections and items, brands should take a more conceptual approach, Panzoni argues. Last week, Dior Homme tapped into balletcore at Paris Fashion Week. Here, designer Kim Jones referenced the house’s existing relationship with ballet. Also, his own late uncle Colin Jones started out at the Royal Ballet and worked with choreographer Rudolf Nureyev. Panzoni points to Miu Miu birthing “librarian chic”. Miuccia Prada introduced the look, which the internet then took and turned it into an aesthetic people could consume.

More often than not, a direct play on core trends makes most sense in a social media context. It’s a lighter lift, less of an investment and still boasts benefits. “Trend-hijacking can help luxury brands, which can sometimes feel disconnected from the everyday consumer, by leveraging relatable TikTok creators,” Permele Doyle, co-founder and president of marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, says. “It can help to make their brand appear more attainable, fresh and less aspirational.”

But this only works when executed quickly and when it genuinely fits the brand, experts caution.

Shoe and ready-to-wear brand Lamara London found success tapping micro-trends in 2023, co-founder Lamara Roma says. “We choose to modify our strategy to align our designs with the emerging micro-trends,” says Roma. “It was interesting to see how people in our community customised their purchases from Lamara to fit in with social media micro-trends.” Last year, this involved a less-stringent social media strategy that made room for matching content to fast-arising trends. The brand’s pink Chiltern Street style saw an uptick this summer with the rise of Barbiecore. In 2024, Lamara will partner with influencers actively involved in micro-trends to be able to react faster, expand reach and up advertising credibility.

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Wholesale advantage

Multi-brand retailers are at an advantage, Panzoni says. “They are able to curate these aesthetics from multiple brands, and establish themselves as a place where these trends exist,” she says.

Ssense does it best. The retailer has posted about the tights trend; coquette by way of Priscilla; feral and clean girl in one; Barbie; the list goes on. Other retailers are also playing the game. Revolve is posting “balletcore” and “coquette girl inspo” TikToks. Farfetch nodded to the pantless trend with a Miu Miu “micro-shorts or underwear?” post. And the colour red dominated Fwrd’s Instagram feed in November; in one post, they dubbed it the “colour of the season”.

Certain trends are bound to reach particular audiences — but may not go further than those who have indicated to their algorithms that they’re interested in a given core. “Sometimes these trends exist in echo chambers,” Panzoni says. “Companies like Ssense can talk about all of these trends without necessarily over-investing in one of them.” By tapping multiple trends, as retailers are primed to do, they can have a wider reach than a brand that doubles down on a single aesthetic and risks restricting itself to a fragment of the market.

Can brands set trends?

The nature of the internet aesthetic is just that — it’s born online. “Take librarian core,” Panzoni says. “Miu Miu didn’t say: ‘librarian core, let’s go!’ It was the community that gave the name to the aesthetic.”

Because of this, brands are better off cultivating communities that are keen to talk about them online. “Brands need a strong point of view and a community online that will talk about their products within the context of a trend,” Panzoni says.

Consumers are also increasingly attuned to what is a marketing activation versus an organic, community-grown trend. “Obviously, there are some huge brands that have built culture kudos to be able to set trends in their sector. But typically, I think we are becoming so astute to what is real or forced that it’s hard for brands to do this right.”

Brands can set consumers up to ignite a trend around a product launch, argues Amy Sturgis, founder and managing director of PR agency ASC Global. She recommends the “ripple effect” to brands, “allowing space for consumer discovery to evolve into the creation of trends”. Gifting and paid influencer campaigns (when done right) can help to build an engaged audience around a product, she says.

Brands can’t dictate every core that users see, but what they can control are the products themselves. This year, Panzoni expects brands to take things a step further and name products after micro-trends, in the vein of blueberry milk nails, as TikTok Shop rises in prominence.

All said, while tapping a trend can lend to a positive brand moment, labels shouldn’t overinvest, Doyle says. “There are so many creative ways to participate and finding these unique ways to do so will increase the chances of achieving virality compared to trying to craft and predict trends.”

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