Very demure: Why brands should pursue meaning over meme-ing

Are you very demure, very mindful? In all honesty, what you probably are is very overwhelmed by a slew of relentless TikTok trends. The latest of these is influencer Jools Lebron’s motivational tongue-in-cheek advice to be “demure” and “mindful” at work and in life. Be gone, brat summer of unhinged hedonism and chaos. That was last week. Now, the feminine aesthetic is low-key, serious and modest.

Except it’s not really, it’s just an ironic take on the never-ending set of rules women must subscribe to, from hot girl summer to clean girl aesthetic to lazy girls and vanilla girls. ‘Demure’ is both the latest of the ‘girl trends’ while also satirising the whole genre – kudos to Lebron’s capture of the meta, messy, dark humour of it all.

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But this complexity can add to the overwhelm. Working in insight, you might feel you’re expected to a) understand all of this b) have an opinion and c) help brands activate these micro trends as they ‘ride the wave’ of culture.

“It’s a bit terrifying,” Katie Matthews, managing director at skincare brand Austin Austin told us. “It’s about the culture of the culture. Does this mean I have to be responding to the whole internet, all of the time?” It’s confusing for parents, too. Lauren Mishcon, podcaster at the Self Care Club, describes the disconnect between generations: “He doesn't speak English anymore. He tells me ‘skibidi toilet, rizz it up, I’ve got a ten merit gyatt’. I don’t know what any of it means!”

It makes our job as cultural researchers – to find meaning in the noise – even more urgent.

Today it’s demure, but next week it will be something else. Language is moving fast these days. Professor and historian of language Anthony Bale explained: “Whereas language used to spread quickly in localities, now because of the internet it moves globally. Language has fewer gatekeepers, people feel democratically empowered to write exactly how they speak”.

In the past, slang would spread when it captured a zeitgeist. Now, the words themselves move faster than the meaning attached to them. We’re left with a kind of emptiness to our language, which ‘cosplays’ communication but is more noise than nuance. One client confided: ‘So much word salad. I hear it in my job all the time’.

By the time you’ve managed to absorb, understand and process these ideas, the chances are they’ve become yesterday’s news. The latest TikTok craze might erupt and fade in an ever-quicker trend cycle, leaving brands struggling to keep up. A 2009 analysis of 100 years of data on first-name adoption in France and the US highlighted that cultural tastes that have been adopted quickly die faster (ie are less likely to persist).

It can feel like we are living in a never-ending-now, a world defined by 24/7 rolling news and opinions. Marketing’s neophilic mindset doesn’t help, nor does the single-speed framing of culture by the insight and trends industry – we’re told that the world is changing faster than ever, brands should move at the speed of culture, that our antennae should be alert and twitching to whatever the latest radar or listening tool picks up. By leaping onto these microtrends, we gain visibility but we risk losing distinctiveness.

Remember when The Roman Empire was trending on TikTok in October 2023? If this one passed you by, it was when women asked the men in their lives how often they thought about the Roman Empire. And the answer was a lot. Obsessively. It inspired many brands to start talking about it. But if every brand jumps on to The Roman Empire, what’s the point?

It raises the question: are we branding or blanding? We talk about being part of the cultural conversation. But have we forgotten what a conversation actually is? It’s not a group of people all parroting exactly the same thing – that’s a chorus. A conversation requires points of view, difference, a to-and-fro. Listening, looking within and responding accordingly, not just repeating.

So, what should the insight industry do to help brands avoid parroting and navigate a messier, louder, more overwhelming cultural world?

1 ) Pursue meaning, not meme-ing

Helping brands to understand that culture has many speeds means having a better sense of history, to attach the fast to the slow. Seen in this light, the demure micro-trend might be part of a longer tradition of policing women’s behaviour in society. By reframing our relationship with time, we can help brands think beyond just occupying a moment and perhaps be part of history in the making – or at the very least avoid making the mistakes of the past.

2 ) Look for trends, not just what is trending

Think cultural understanding, not just activation. There is power in moving fast to form a collaboration with the latest influencer, but brands should be thinking about cultural connection with the same strategic principles and balance that Les Binet and Peter Field outline in The Long and Short of It. Industry-wide vocabulary around how genuine cultural understanding helps building brands is lacking and the focus has been on shorter-term activations-focused ideas.

3 ) Branding, not blanding

The rules of distinctiveness – of being recognisably and identifiably you – apply whatever territory you are playing in, even more so in a cultural world overflowing with new attention-seeking content. Too often, aiming for relevance in culture means brands lose a sense of themselves. It’s in vogue to talk about listening to what’s going on out there in culture, but it has to be married to asking questions about why it makes sense to the brand or if it’s something to ignore.

“The trick is to wait for a cultural moment that feels like it’s relevant to you as a brand, so that you can say: ‘Yes, we can move on this. We know our audience,’” said Matthews.

People and communities will welcome brands who truly contribute something to their culture. There is a reason why Red Bull’s work in the music scene perhaps remains the gold standard. But the opposite holds true; if you have nothing to add other than appropriating other people’s language, then you can pretend you are adding to the conversation all you like – all you’ll end up doing is clearing the room.

Annie Auerbach and Adam Chmielowski are co-founders of Starling Strategy