Sunday morning, food cart lot on Hawthorne, waiting on a breakfast burrito and scrolling. In the space of about four minutes I watched a regional bank, a mattress company, a dental group, and a company that sells industrial fasteners each explain that their product was very demure, very mindful.
Jools Lebron made that phrase two and a half weeks ago. She made it in a car, on the way to work, about how she does her makeup for her job. It was funny because it was specific and hers and slightly deadpan, and because the delivery had a rhythm nobody else had.
By the time the fastener company got there, it had none of those properties. It had a phrase.
That is the whole lifecycle now. Two weeks from origin to exhaustion, and the brands arrive at week three.
The clock on a trend does not start when your team notices it. It starts when it is made, and legal review is not a pause button, it is a lateness machine.
I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, so I know exactly what those three weeks contain. Somebody clips the video into a Slack channel. A social manager writes three options. Those go to a brand lead, who is on PTO. They come back with a note about tone. Legal wants to know whether the phrase is trademarked and whether we are making a claim. Two versions get killed and the surviving one has the joke sanded off, because the joke was the risky part and the process is designed to remove the risky part.
Then it ships, and it is a brand doing an impression of a person doing a bit.
Then it ships, and it is a brand doing an impression of a person doing a bit.
There are exactly two ways out and neither is a faster approval chain. The first is to give a small team real standing authority to post inside a narrow, pre-agreed lane, so the decision takes an hour instead of a fortnight. That requires trusting a junior person in public, which most companies say they do and almost none actually do.
The second is to stop chasing entirely and build something repeatable that is yours. The brands that feel culturally current are rarely the fastest to a sound. They have a running bit of their own that people come back to. Duolingo is not winning because it is quick on trends. It is winning because the owl is a character with continuity, and continuity is the thing a two week meme cannot give you.
Nobody was ever going to remember your fastener post. They were going to remember hers.
Truffles is very demure. Barnaby knocked a glass of water off the counter at 6 a.m. and looked directly at me. Not mindful. Not one bit.