Trend, Culture, and Brand - Part 2

Seeing clarity in chaos, building order from patterns

Part 2: The Path to Clarity

credit: The WanderingSoul from Behance

Why focus on trends, culture, and brand? Because these elements are deeply intertwined. Whether we analyze data to answer “what” or craft narratives to explain “why,” true clarity only comes when we connect them.

The famous “cerulean story,” as editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly explains to an unknowing Andrea Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada, illustrates how clarity emerges from connecting seemingly unrelated dots—from a spark of creativity to the runway, to mass production—before the color is unconsciously chosen by a fashion-indifferent consumer like Andrea.

This story has always inspired me.

When we focus too narrowly on a client’s brief, we risk missing the bigger picture: the historical, social, economic, and cultural forces that shape both brand and consumer behavior. Understanding these layers, both major and subtle, is essential to building truly effective solutions.

Let’s dive deeper into trends, culture, and brand and explore how they inform one another.

Trends:

There are two levels of trend observation.

• Macro trends are seen from a bird's eye view. They highlight large-scale shifts, geopolitics, technology, economic forces, and social dynamics that shape entire industries and demand attention from C-suite leaders. For example, McKinsey’s  “How CEOs are responding to geopolitical uncertainty”, explores tariffs, trade negotiations, and geopolitical tensions keeping CEOs awake at night. These factors are eventually filtered and trickled down to the detailed objectives reflected in the final brief.

  
  

• Micro trends are closer to the consumer level—fads, hype cycles, and behaviors that unfold daily in cities like Shanghai or New York. These are easier to spot because they are always happening in real time.

Culture:

There’s a famous saying: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” While originally applied to management, it perfectly explains marketing and branding as well.

Without cultural nuance, even the most flawless strategy fails, and sometimes spectacularly. History is full of examples: brands like Dior and D&G have sparked outrage in China with campaigns that ignored or misunderstood deeply rooted cultural meanings. Cultural appropriation remains one of the costliest mistakes brands make.

As brand consultants, we must see ourselves as cultural strategists. Every consumer embodies culture, whether individually or collectively, reflecting specific values, traditions, and aesthetics.

Brand:

At last, we return to the brief, the one from our “dear client papa.”

As I wrote in Part 1, clients come to us because they’ve lost direction in chaos and uncertainty. They need a North Star.

Once we’ve gathered the data, our task is to analyze it, find the truth, and create a strategy that connects the “what” with the “why.” This is a grueling process; it often feels like navigating a labyrinth of trends, cultural context, and business myths. Each step we take needs to reveal the truth, but not enhance the myth.

We are like ER doctors, saving a critical patient: we must identify vital signs before being distracted by symptoms that seem urgent but are not. We must focus, cut through noise, and remove irrelevant data, at least for now, to let the truth emerge.

Storytelling’s purpose is not to overwhelm with dazzling visuals or clever twists, but to tell the truth. Simple. Elegant.

That is clarity.