The trend is not for you

The trend was never the strategy

Imagine a homeware maker in a South African town that is neither Cape Town nor Johannesburg but somewhere quieter, where the pace of the street changes after 3PM and customers still arrive because someone told them, with unusual insistence, that they must visit the shop before driving home.

She has spent years developing a recognisable language of colour, glaze and form, and the people who buy from her understand the particular stillness of the work. Then someone tells her that short-form video is the future, which is how she finds herself at eleven on a Tuesday night, holding a phone against a stack of books and attempting to lip-sync to an audio clip that has nothing to do with her, her ceramics or the world she has taken such care to make.

The reel performs modestly, although nothing disastrous follows; the shop opens the next morning, the regulars remain and a few hundred people move past the video before forgetting it. The more interesting cost is quieter, because she has given an evening of her limited attention to producing something that could have come from almost anyone, while the story only she could tell the origin of the clay, the failure that led to a better glaze, the reason one cup sits more comfortably in the hand, remains unpublished.

This is where indiscriminate trend-chasing tends to end, not with a spectacular collapse in sales or a public rejection of the brand, but with the gradual exchange of something distinctive for something current.

The pressure to participate

The pressure is not irrational, particularly when social platforms now sit so close to the point of discovery. A 2024 GSMA report found that the use of digital media by South African micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) had risen from 35% in 2020 to 55% in 2024, which means that, for hustlepreneurs and established owner-led businesses alike, the question is no longer simply whether to be online but how to behave once there. (GSMA, Digital Economy in South Africa and the Role of Mobile)

From behind the counter or inside the workshop, a business owner can watch a competitor gain three thousand followers in a week, see the same format spread from skincare to furniture and begin to suspect that everyone else has been given a set of instructions that somehow missed her inbox. The before-and-after, the founder speaking directly to camera, the sped-up packing video and the sound that appears so often it begins to feel compulsory can all create the impression that relevance has acquired a formula.

Beneath this is something more honest, because running a small, high-craft business is often quiet work with an uncomfortably slow feedback loop. You make something carefully, release it into the world and wait, while a trend appears to offer a shortcut through the silence, promising to turn movement into attention and attention into proof that the business is growing.

The difficulty is that attention can prove many things without proving the one that matters. A view might mean that the first second of a video was arresting, that the audio was familiar or that the platform tested the content with a larger audience, but it does not necessarily mean that anyone understood the product, remembered the maker or moved closer to buying.

Being current without becoming interchangeable

A sensible argument against trend-chasing should not become an argument against trends themselves, because formats change, audiences develop new habits and businesses that refuse to learn the language of the platforms they use can become difficult to discover. Even TikTok’s own guidance distinguishes between fleeting “trend moments” and broader signals or cultural forces that may last for months or years, which is a useful reminder that participating in online culture does not always require repeating the audio clip of the week. (TikTok Trends Digest)

The stronger question is not whether a business should follow a trend, but whether the trend gives it a useful way to express something that was already true. A furniture maker might use a before-and-after format to show the restoration of a damaged piece, while a guesthouse could use a day-in-the-life video to reveal the early-morning work behind a breakfast guests remember; in both cases, the format is borrowed, but the substance belongs entirely to the business.

Problems begin when the format demands a performance that the brand cannot inhabit comfortably. If the owner must translate herself into someone else’s register, forcing a quiet ceramics studio to behave like a streetwear account or making a small-batch distillery borrow the pace of a fast-fashion haul, that difficulty is worth noticing because it is often the first indication that the idea does not fit.

This does not mean that brands must be solemn, predictable or imprisoned by an aesthetic decided five years ago. A serious furniture maker may be funny, a luxury guesthouse may be playful and a restrained homeware brand may have an owner with a wonderfully irreverent personality, but those qualities should be revealed rather than manufactured for the duration of a trend.

What audiences notice

Audiences are more alert to this tension than they are sometimes given credit for. The 2025 Sprout Social Index, based on surveys conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia rather than South Africa, found that 93% of consumers considered it important for brands to keep pace with online culture, while a third found it embarrassing when brands simply jumped onto viral trends and 27% believed that this kind of participation was effective only within the first 24 to 48 hours. (Sprout Social)

The geography of that study means it should not be presented as a direct measure of South African consumers, although the contradiction it reveals is useful: people expect brands to understand the culture around them, but they do not necessarily want every brand to repeat it. In the same research, authenticity and relatability were the qualities consumers valued most, while about half said that original content was what made their favourite brands stand out.

For an independent business, originality need not mean inventing an entirely new form of media every week. It can mean showing what larger and less personal businesses struggle to show: the judgement behind the product, the hands involved in its making, the local relationships supporting it and the small decisions through which quality accumulates.

A ceramics studio does not need to dance beside a kiln when it could explain why a batch emerged differently from the last one. A clothing designer does not need to recite a trending script when she could show why a seam was moved by two centimetres, while a coffee roaster may find more value in documenting the weekly ritual of testing a roast than in impersonating a creator whose real product is entertainment.

The quiet cost of the wrong trend

The wrong trend rarely fails loudly enough to make the lesson obvious, because the numbers may be respectable and the comments perfectly pleasant. Its cost appears elsewhere, in the hours spent learning a format that will expire by Friday, the creative fatigue of feeding a system with no clear destination and the slow weakening of the recognisable thread running through everything the business publishes.

Reach is not useless, but reach without relevance can become expensive theatre, particularly for a small business whose owner is also its buyer, production manager, salesperson and final point of quality control. The standard for participation should therefore be higher than “this might get views,” because the same evening could be spent improving the wholesale information, photographing the collection properly or writing to five buyers whose customers already value this kind of work.

This is where a social-media decision returns to the larger marketing strategy. The right content should help a particular audience notice, understand or trust the business, while the right call to action should give that attention somewhere useful to go.

Finding the formats that belong to you

Knowing whether a trend fits begins with knowing what the business is beyond its category, because “homeware,” “hospitality” and “fashion” are too broad to provide meaningful direction. The furniture maker working in reclaimed yellowwood and accepting only a handful of commissions each year is not in the same conversation as a flat-pack retailer, even though both sell tables, while the guesthouse people drive two hours to reach is offering something different from the perfectly respectable hotel chosen because it has a room available on Tuesday.

Once that distinction is clear, trends become easier to assess. If a format reveals the process, character or point of view that makes the business valuable, it may be worth adapting; if it obscures the product, attracts an audience with no plausible interest in buying or requires the owner to perform a personality that disappears the moment the camera stops, it can be left to someone else without regret.

There are three questions sitting beneath that decision, although they need not become another checklist pasted above the desk. The owner needs to know whether the content still makes sense when the trending sound is removed, whether it tells the intended customer something worth knowing and whether it can be made in a way that feels recognisable as the business itself.

When the answers are yes, a trend can become a useful container rather than a creative instruction. When they are no, the discomfort is not evidence that the owner is falling behind; it is information about where the boundaries of the brand lie.

Consistency needs somewhere to go

The answer is not simply to remain in one’s lane and publish the same beautiful image every Thursday, because consistency without intention can become another form of drift. A recognisable voice matters, but it should be connected to the commercial life of the business, helping the right people discover an offer, understand its value and know what to do next.

For one maker, this might mean a considered series about materials and process that gives interior designers confidence in the work, followed by a trade page that makes enquiries straightforward. For another, it might be a seasonal journal sent to previous customers, a collection of short videos answering the questions people ask in the shop or a steady record of commissions that shows potential buyers what can be made without suggesting that everything is immediately available.

This kind of content compounds because each piece adds to a coherent understanding of the business. It may still produce a sudden spike in attention, particularly when one story reaches beyond the existing audience, but it does not depend on the spike to justify the work.

The businesses that become small institutions in their towns, that visitors seek out by name and that editors choose to write about are rarely preserved in people’s memories because they successfully borrowed the loudest thing in the room. They become memorable because they keep giving the public a clear and recognisable experience of who they are, even as their methods, products and platforms continue to evolve.

For a small business with limited time, this is not an argument for ignoring culture or refusing experimentation; it is an argument for using both with more discernment. The point is to remain open enough to recognise a useful new language while being certain enough of the business not to lose its own accent.

A trend can carry a good idea further, introduce a maker to someone new and give familiar work an unexpected form, but it cannot decide what the business should mean. That slower, more consequential work belongs to the people building the brand, and it is worth protecting from anything that promises relevance at the price of recognition.