Every Monday morning, somewhere in a conference room with a ring light in the corner, a social team is hunched over a laptop asking the same desperate question: what’s trending, and how fast can we get on it? Somebody pulls up the sound of the week. Somebody else drafts a script where the brand’s mascot lip-syncs it. Legal gets looped in. By the time the thing clears approvals on Thursday, the sound is dead, the creators who made it have moved on, and the comments section is doing what comments sections do best, which is reminding the brand it showed up to the party after the cops left.
This is the default operating system for most brand social right now, and it’s a broken one. Sprout Social puts the peak of most TikTok trends somewhere between three and seven days. SocialPilot’s read is that the practical window for a brand to jump on one is roughly a week from the moment it’s spotted. Think about what that actually means for a marketing department with a two-step approval chain. It means the entire strategy is a race the brand is structurally designed to lose, and even when it wins, the prize is a few days of borrowed relevance before the cycle resets and the whole sprint starts again.
We call this what it is: renting culture. Trend-jacking is a short-term lease on somebody else’s idea, and the lease expires in about 72 hours. You don’t build equity in a rental. You don’t get to paint the walls. And when you move out, nobody remembers you lived there.
The irony is that audiences aren’t asking brands to sprint. Sprout’s own consumer research found that 93% of people expect brands to keep up with online culture, but the same data shows they favor brands that engage authentically over those that jump on every moment blindly. Read that twice. Keeping up with culture and chasing trends are not the same thing, and the industry has spent the better part of a decade treating them as synonyms. Keeping up means you understand the room. Chasing means you’re yelling the same joke everyone else told an hour ago, louder, with a logo on it.
So if renting culture is a losing game, what’s the alternative? Owning a piece of it. Not the trend, the scene.
A trend is a moment. A scene is a place, a set of rituals, and a group of people who keep coming back because something real happens there. Trends are things that happen to culture. Scenes are where culture actually gets made. Skate parks, run clubs, record stores, the corner sneaker shop where everybody knows which drop is worth camping out for: these are the engine rooms. Trends are just the exhaust.
The data on this is no longer subtle. Strava reported that run club creation on its platform in the United States was up roughly fourfold year over year in 2025, and its 2024 Year in Sport report found a 59% jump in running club participation globally. The press coverage landed on a line that should be tattooed on every CMO’s forearm: run clubs are the new nightclubs. And the reason people join isn’t pace charts. In Strava’s mid-year data, 55% of Gen Z said community is the biggest reason they join a club. People are not looking for content. They are looking for somewhere to belong, and they are actively leaving their houses at 6 a.m. on a Tuesday to find it.
Now watch what the smartest brands have done with that energy, because none of them got there by chasing anything.
Tracksmith launched in 2014, founded by Matt Taylor, a former Puma marketing executive, alongside Luke Scheybeler, who came out of Rapha. Their bet was almost perverse in its simplicity: don’t compete with Nike on technology or celebrity, compete on understanding running culture better than anyone else. Taylor has said that at the start, he didn’t even want to show running in the brand’s imagery. Instead, the work lived in the before and after: the early alarm, the breakfast, the sleep, the obsessive rituals that only runners recognize as their own. Tracksmith publishes a quarterly magazine, Meter, with no overt ads. Its Trackhouse stores in Boston, London, and New York function as clubhouses, and Taylor told Glossy the brand hosts free community runs three days a week out of its Boston location, with other running groups using the store as their meeting point. He described the store as a service to the community as much as a retail space. That’s not a store. That’s a scene with a cash register.
Aimé Leon Dore took the same idea and pointed it at a borough. Teddy Santis built the brand out of Queens in 2014, and rather than flattening that origin into generic downtown cool, the brand made it the entire point. Its “World’s Borough” editorial cast the actual people of Queens, a place where residents speak more than 135 languages, as the faces of the collection. Then Santis put a Greek café inside the Mulberry Street flagship, and suddenly the store became somewhere you went to linger, not just shop. When the brand opened its Los Angeles flagship on Melrose, it didn’t drop a New York store in West Hollywood. It built a Mediterranean courtyard around an 80-year-old olive tree, with a café that, as one writer put it, isn’t an add-on but part of the whole. LVMH didn’t invest in Aimé Leon Dore because of a viral Reel. It invested in a world people wanted to stand inside of.
And then there’s Red Bull, the patron saint of scene-building, which figured out decades ago that the drink was the least interesting thing it sold. Red Bull didn’t hop on extreme sports trends. It funded the athletes, built the events, filmed everything, and eventually became one of the most prolific media companies in action sports. When Felix Baumgartner jumped from the edge of space in 2012, nobody called it a trend. It was the logical conclusion of a brand that had spent twenty years being the scene instead of commenting on it.
Here’s what these brands understand that most of the market still doesn’t: when you build a scene, content stops being a production problem and becomes a byproduct. Tracksmith doesn’t need to scramble for Tuesday’s post. Tuesday’s post is the 6 a.m. run that already happened. Aimé Leon Dore doesn’t need a trending sound. It has a café full of people who look like the brand because they are the brand. The content calendar doesn’t get filled. It fills itself, because something real keeps happening in front of the camera.
That’s also why scene-built content outperforms trend-built content in the metrics that actually matter. A trend video gets a spike and a cliff. Metricool’s research found that 96% of a TikTok’s views land in its first ten days, which is fine if the video is one chapter in an ongoing story and catastrophic if it’s a standalone bit borrowed from somebody else. Scene content compounds. Every run, every drop, every gathering adds to an archive of proof that the brand is actually part of something. Trend content evaporates. Scene content accumulates.
We’ve seen this play out up close with FAV 5, the recurring content series we built for Laced SouthBay. The premise is simple, which is exactly why it works: a sneaker shop is already one of the purest scenes left in retail, a place with its own language, its own regulars, and its own hierarchy of taste. We didn’t need to import a trend into that room. We needed to build a format that let the room speak, the same question asked every week to the people who actually live in that culture. It doesn’t expire at the end of the week, because the scene it documents doesn’t expire either.
None of this means trends are worthless. Trends are weather reports. They tell you what the atmosphere feels like right now, and a brand that ignores them entirely is a brand that doesn’t understand its audience. The mistake is building the house out of weather. Use trends as signal. Build your strategy on scenes.
So how does a brand actually do this without faking it? Because make no mistake, the only thing worse than a brand chasing trends is a brand cosplaying as a community it has never set foot in. Audiences can smell manufactured belonging from three neighborhoods away, and they will drag you for it in public.
It starts with picking a scene you have a legitimate right to be in. Not the one with the most followers, the one where your product, your people, and your history actually overlap with what the community cares about. A coffee brand has a right to the café scene. A fitness studio has a right to the run club scene. An insurance agent who has been writing policies in the same zip code for thirty years has a right to that neighborhood’s story. Legitimacy isn’t optional. It’s the entry fee.
Then show up physically, repeatedly, and on a schedule. Scenes are built on rituals, and rituals are built on repetition. Tracksmith’s runs happen three days a week, every week. That consistency is the strategy. A one-off activation is a trend wearing a scene’s clothes.
Then fund the people, not just the moment. Give the community’s actual leaders a platform, a budget, a stage, or a space. Red Bull built its empire by paying for things athletes already wanted to do. The fastest way to earn a seat in a scene is to make the scene better for the people who were already there.
And finally, document everything, because this is where most brands with real community still leave the money on the table. The scene is the asset. Content is how that asset scales beyond the people physically in the room. Without a deliberate creative system capturing what’s happening, a brand with a genuine scene ends up with a loyal crowd of fifty and an Instagram that looks like it was abandoned in 2021.
Here in Los Angeles, this isn’t theoretical. This city is a patchwork of scenes stacked on top of each other: the run crews looping the Silver Lake Reservoir, the sneaker shops in the South Bay, the coffee bars in Highland Park that function as unofficial offices for half the creative class. What reads as authentic in one of those rooms reads as tourist behavior in another. The brands that win here aren’t the ones with the fastest trend response. They’re the ones that actually know which room they belong in.
The algorithm will keep serving up a new trend every week until the end of time. That treadmill isn’t going anywhere, and neither are the brands sprinting on it, red-faced and slightly behind. But culture isn’t made on a treadmill. It’s made in rooms, on corners, at 6 a.m. on a Tuesday, among people who keep showing up for each other. Stop renting moments. Build somewhere people want to be, and the content, the loyalty, and the relevance will follow you home.
