Brand Confessional: Anu Lingala on Why Trend Strategy ≠ Trend Chasing
Where trends fit into brand strategy
Today I’m sharing a conversation with Anu Lingala, a trend strategist who has worked with Nordstrom, Mejuri, Adidas, and MAC Cosmetics.
Trends can be tricky thing for brand marketers. They are great for inspiring campaigns and products that feel relevant to today’s consumer preferences. But if a brand focuses too much on chasing trends, it can lose sight of its own point of view and what makes the brand interesting in the first place.
Great brands don’t tend to follow trends; they create them. But often these ‘created’ trends are connected to macro shifts already percolating beneath the surface. For example, brands focused on ingredient transparency in snacks and skincare link to macro trends around health and wellness.
Today’s question: How do you translate trends into value-add initiatives for your brand?
A few things Anu said that stuck with me:
Trends without a brand lens are noise. You want to filter any trends through your brand values to understand its implications for your brand and audience. If a trend doesn’t connect to something your brand already stands for, activating on it will feel hollow. If you don’t have clear brand values, start there.
Activating on trends requires organizational alignment. Having a bank of trends is one thing, but aligning product and marketing teams toward the same insight and deciding which cultural shifts to allocate resources to is what separates brands with trend ROI from brands with a nice PowerPoint.
Trend timelines matter. Short-term trends (3–12 months) can inform your campaign and marketing decisions. But you want more durable, longer-horizon trends (12–24 months+) to inform product design.
Interview below. Enjoy.
Tell us about yourself: what do you do, and what’s the unfair advantage you bring to it?
I’m a Trend Strategist. It’s a hybrid title that I made up to capture my expertise: I can sift through the trend noise to identify emergent cultural insights, and I can then translate them into commercial opportunities for brands.
Most trend forecasters don’t have experience disseminating ideas inside corporations, while most brand marketers don’t have the time or training to research and analyze trends. I merge both.
What’s something you read or watched that changed how you think about business?
Zoe Scaman’s piece on Growth².
She argues that the most durable growth isn’t linear scaling at speed; it’s the kind that multiplies exponentially over time by unlocking new possibilities through adaptability, interactions, and cultural resonance.
Trend strategy can be a hard case to make in rooms that are measuring last-click attribution and quarterly ROI. The Growth² framework made me a better advocate for my work because the brands we admire most aren’t optimizing for the short-term; they’re compounding cultural equity over years.
What do most people get wrong about “brand”?
Many people seem to think of ‘brand’ as the visual world — the logo, the color palette, the campaign. But it’s actually the operating system behind everything, from product to marketing to corporate culture. When I work with any brand, understanding its values, positioning, and market differentiation becomes the lens through which I filter all trend research.
Which company’s marketing are you most jealous of right now, and why?
Miu Miu is the best example right now of what it looks like to translate brand identity consistently across every touchpoint, and to use brand as a foundation for building a cultural world that extends beyond the products you sell. Critically, it’s also been a slow-burn build towards its current cultural position — it didn’t happen overnight.
On the smaller side, it’s been fun to watch how Dieux has figured out how to leverage radical honesty (about ingredients, pricing, supply chain, etc.) to their advantage, turning it into a brand differentiator in a space rife with misinformation, with initiatives like placing the exact percentages of their hero actives right on their packaging in place of miracle claims.
Miu Miu’s success has been a slow-burn build towards its current cultural position — it didn’t happen overnight.
If you had to kill every marketing channel but one, what survives?
Experiences.
This means events, moments, activations people actually want to be part of. These may not be easily scalable, but that’s what makes them powerful. It’s the only channel that turns customers into your content engine. If you create something worth talking about, everything else follows from it. That’s how you get organic reach without being at the mercy of an algorithm.
If I’m thinking more about reach and efficiency, I’d say email, since you own it: no algorithm, no platform risk, no dependency. And there are ways to use email creatively and editorially as a brand building tool as well, although not a lot of companies do that well, because it becomes far too tempting to abuse email to push product.
Experiences are the only channel that turn your customers into a content engine.
What’s the difference between spotting a trend and forecasting one?
They’re actually very similar.
Forecasting is differentiated by an initial grounding in historical analysis and cultural theory that provides frameworks to understand trend trajectories. The next step is spotting a trend. That refers to identifying a ‘trend signal’ (an example of this trend occurring) that is directionally indicative. Trend ‘spotting’ ends with identification. Comparatively, trend forecasting continues in exploring future trajectories: How influential is this trend? How long might it last? Will it spread beyond its initial boundaries? What are its implications for culture, consumers and brands?
How do you tell if a trend has real staying power versus a short spike?
If your feeds are anything like mine, you encounter dozens of “trend” articles and posts every week. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and feel like everything is a trend. It’s equally tempting to dismiss all of it as nonsense.
When I’m evaluating a new signal I’ve spotted, I ask questions like:
Does this relate to any shifts in values or behaviors I’ve already been tracking?
Is it linked to any broader cultural macro-trends, cross-category trends, or other clusters of signals that I’ve noticed?
Are there potential follow-on implications that suggest this signal worth my attention?
Say you’re a brand armed with a list of the best trend research. How do you turn those trends into actual actions that drive business?
The first step is to filter trend research through the lens of your brand, your customer, your product category, and your marketing channels. Trend research that hasn’t been contextualized to a brand’s specific situation is just interesting noise that may even derail a business.
After taking that initial step, the translation from those trends into actions and opportunities that drive business is quite straightforward.
What gets in the way, I’ve learned, depends on the company. At large companies like Nordstrom, the hurdles are organizational silos and leadership misalignment. Trend strategy can be centralized, but it needs to be activated by cross-functional teams with different priorities and incentives, and changes in leadership can derail years of progress overnight. Meanwhile, at smaller companies like Mejuri, approvals are easy and enthusiasm is high, but the barriers are around execution: risk aversion in relation to budget constraints.
What is an overhyped and underrated source of insight?
Overhyped: social listening, specifically in relation to trends. If your customer is already talking about the concept at that scale, it’s probably too late for you to activate it in any meaningful way (beyond your own social posts).
Social listening is great at identifying what’s dominating the cultural conversation, but not at surfacing what’s emerging.
Underrated: academic disciplines— cultural theory, semiotics, sociology, history. These are the foundations of understanding how culture moves and they provide the groundwork that informs all trend forecasting. Semiotics in particular is a tool I use constantly — it’s a methodology for reading what things mean, not just what they are, which is the kind of analysis that separates trend work from a mood board.
If you had to bet on a single trend for tomorrow, what would it be?
I think Algorithmic Evasion, which I first wrote about last September, is just starting to percolate in its early stages. This trend is not simply a desire to unplug, go analog, and stay offline — it’s about finding ways to continue reaping the benefits of a connected world while simultaneously avoiding its negative aspects.
Early signals include Perfectly Imperfect’s anti-algorithmic social network and Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Operating System. More recently, we’ve seen young people creating cyberdecks preloaded with a thoughtfully curated set of media, like music, books, and games, as an alternative device for offline use or for when they don’t want to use their smartphone. They’re trying to find ways to easily access certain digital media while also trying to mitigate their addiction to algorithmic content. For brands, there is a rapidly incoming imperative to invest in non-algorithmic means of generating brand resonance as trajectories of influence evolve to become untrackable by design.
Anu is a Trends Strategist who has worked for Nordstrom, Mejuri, Canada Goose, Visa, MAC Cosmetics, Pepsi, and Adidas. Find her on Substack and Linkedin.
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