Karaoke night, first Tuesday of the month, the bar in Southeast where the floor sticks and the host calls everybody baby. A bachelorette party got up and did an entire choreographed routine to a Britney song. It was not good. It was tremendous. Eight minutes later a work team, clearly out on some kind of offsite, saw how well that had gone and tried the same move with a different song. The room went politely quiet.
Same bar. Same host. Eight minutes apart.
Every brand that has asked me about TikTok challenges this fall is the second group.
The question always arrives the same way. Someone senior saw a statistic about Gen Z, someone junior is already on the app, and the brief comes back reading 'we want to start a challenge.' Which is roughly like announcing that you want to start a rumor about yourself. You can try. You do not control the outcome, and the attempt is visible.
A challenge is not a format you can buy your way into, it is something that happens to brands people already have a reason to play with.
Look at what actually worked this year. Chipotle got the guacamole dance because guacamole was already a thing customers had feelings about and an upcharge they already had jokes about. The lid flip worked because people were already flipping the lids in the store. Chipotle did not invent a behavior. It noticed one, gave it a name and a date, and got out of the way.
What separated those from the dozens of quiet failures was not budget and it was not the sound selection. It was whether an existing behavior was there to point at. If your customers are not already doing something with your product, in public, unprompted, you do not have a challenge. You have an ad with a hashtag on it, and this app is unusually good at telling the difference.
So the test I give clients is one question, and it has nothing to do with TikTok. What do people already do with your thing when nobody is watching? If you cannot answer that with a specific physical behavior, go find one. That is research, it takes about six weeks, and it will be worth more than the challenge would have been.
If your customers are not already doing something with your product, in public, unprompted, you do not have a challenge.
The yes cases are real. Food, beauty, anything with a gesture attached. If that is you, move fast and keep the production ugly.
The bachelorette party was not reading the room. They were going to do that routine in a parking lot if they had to, and that is the entire difference. I thought about it the whole drive home, and then Barnaby met me at the door and demanded dinner, wholly unimpressed.