What role do trends play in brand strategy development?

A brand strategy is a bridge between the goals of a business and why anyone is going to care. Trends give you a source of insight into things that matter, or are going to increasingly matter to those people you need to influence: your potential buyers.  Knowing what matters to them is important for two reasons. Firstly, it helps to ensure your brand strategy is relevant. Secondly it helps to ensure you're creating a strategy that will last for the long-term. 

Read on for the two different types of trends, which one you need to pay attention to, case studies of brands that used trends to improve their brand strategy and business growth and where to find the right trend sources.

What trends are and how to use them in brand strategy

What are we talking about when we refer to trends?

Trends: A general development or change in the way something is moving or people are behaving (Cambridge Dictionary). 

There are different sorts of trends.  Some are more long-term – signifying a big shift in the way people think or behave or the way the market or category is being considered or consumed.  Some are very short term seasonal trends or fads. The first are often called macro trends and the second micro trends. 

Brand strategy is setting a long term direction for a business so don’t get sucked into the micro trends that will be gone next season.  You want to look at the longer term trends.  It takes time to build the associations you want to stand for in people’s minds . You don’t want to be changing your brand strategy every year or you will struggle to stand for anything.

Why trends are important for brand strategy work

Long-term trends are important because they feed into one of those lenses you have to look through when doing brand strategy: relevance.

There are different facets to being relevant. The first is being relevant to what the buyer cares about. This includes both rational things - the jobs they want the product to do for them – and emotional things - the universal, human needs that your brand should tap into.  These emotional things can be positive desires -– like joy, pleasure, discovery - or things your buyer is struggling with - like confidence, overwhelm, connection. 

Relevance is also about understanding the cultural codes and market shifts that are influencing buyers and employees. Cultural codes are the shared meanings, expectations, values and norms that influence what buyers find relevant. These can change, both in society and in buyer expectations. 

Researching trends can help you understand both of these things.

How does understanding trends help you write a better brand strategy?

To understand what a ‘better’ strategy is depends on the problem or opportunity your client is facing. Digging into trends can help you diagnose that problem and suggest a different approach for their brand strategy.  Here are two examples of brands who used trends to help them rewrite their brand strategy and grow the business.

How Taco Bell used trends to refresh their brand strategy

Taco Bell was facing a steep drop in sales until they managed a successful turnaround based on a better understanding of the cultural codes that were relevant to their buyers. For years, the company had operated on the idea that people saw their food mainly as fuel. Their brand strategy was all about their food being affordable, tasty and convenient. This approach had worked well back in the 1990s, but by 2011, new customer research revealed something different: “food wasn’t just fuel anymore… a brand had to offer a memorable, shareable experience.”  The “fast foodie” consumer had arrived and Taco Bell weren’t appealing to them.

With this insight, the CEO introduced a new motto: “From fuel to experience.” He even had it printed and placed on everyone’s desk to drive the shift home.

Taco Bell’s brand strategy from that point on wasn’t just to be affordable, tasty, and convenient; it would now aim to be surprising, exciting, and worth sharing.  That led to a lot of product innovation and long-lasting campaigns like Live Más (“Live More”) which has since become the driving philosophy of brand the brand.

(Read more on this story in RED Marketing: The Three Ingredients of Leading Brands by Creed and Muench).

How IBM used trends to refresh their brand strategy

IBM is a great B2B example of a company aligning its brand with directional shifts in the market. Back in 2008, the trend they observed was the world was becoming more interconnected, data-driven, and complex. IBM acted on this and rebranded around the idea of “building a smarter planet.” They positioned themselves as leaders in helping industries—like energy, water, traffic, and education—create smarter systems.

This approach was a smart blend of IBM’s evolving business goals based on the shifts that were happening in the market with a brand strategy that helped people understand why IBM’s work mattered: building a smarter planet.

Changing your brand strategy to reflect big directional trends in the market that your business can take advantage of can help position your brand as a category leader. Being perceived as a leader is one of the four things Kantar have identified as key to a brand being seen as different (the other three are being perceived as relatively better at something, having distinctive brand assets and being clear on an emotional territory you stand for). Being different and relevant predisposes people to feel a brand is right for them.   Brands with strong predisposition have nine times more volume share, people will pay twice the price for them and they’re twice as likely to grow value share in the future than brands with weaker predisposition. (See Kantar's Blueprint for Brand Growth for more on this).

So in short – understanding trends can help you understand how to write a strategy that is more relevant and different – which can help drive business growth. 

Where do you find the trends? 

The first place to start is to ask your client to share what they already have. Most clients buy analyst reports and general trend reports on the category. If they have nothing, then search for trend reports on the category the brand is operating in - but don’t look too narrowly.  For instance, when I’m working with luxury hotels I’m looking at the ultra-high-net-worth traveller, luxury trends in general as well as reports on the five-star hospitality industry. Other things like food and drink and wellness trends are also relevant to what prospective guests want from a luxury hotel experience.

At the time of writing, there is a global collective of trend experts, including people like leading cultural strategist Amy Daroukakis, who collate the latest pay-wall free trends reports in one place: in 2024 there were over 200 reports in the free resource the collective pulls together. You can access the latest 2025 reports here: It’s a great place to start. 

In summary: why trends are useful in brand strategy work

Looking at trends gives you another source of customer insight to add to your own proprietary customer and competitor research. It gives you more fodder and data to work with.  It can be helpful to quantify some ideas. For instance - putting data and statistics around what luxury really means to people. This can help give your clients a greater degree of confidence in some of the ideas you share, particularly if they can’t afford to run their own quantitative research.   

Just be sure to focus on the longer-term directional shifts not just temporary fads, and include trends as just one part of many things you need to understand to ensure your brand strategy is relevant, different and authentic. 

Want more help?

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