Brands now have more opportunities to appear than ever before. Short-form video, creator collaborations, memes, seasonal campaigns, cultural moments, AI-generated content, new visual styles and new platforms create a constant stream of possibilities.
The problem is no longer a shortage of opportunities.
It is deciding which ones deserve a response.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report suggests that relevance can no longer be reduced to appearing in pop culture. In its global survey of 17,688 respondents across 15 countries, Edelman frames relevance through several dimensions: utility, identity, community, emotional connection and cultural fluency. Globally, utility was the strongest relevance driver, while pop-culture fluency was the weakest among the dimensions studied.
A brand can therefore look highly current without necessarily feeling relevant to customers' lives.
Relevance Is Not the Same as Looking Trendy
A restaurant does not automatically become relevant because it uses the latest meme.
A fashion brand is not necessarily more relevant because it redesigns its visuals around the aesthetic of the month.
A technology company does not become more relevant simply by placing “AI” into every campaign.
Trends can be communication vehicles. They are not the same thing as the reason customers choose a brand.
Edelman's global research found that trust in a brand ranks almost alongside quality and value as an important purchase criterion. Its broader argument is that trust and relevance work together: relevance creates fit, while trust provides confidence.
In Southeast Asia, Kantar BrandZ 2026 found that the region's Top 30 most valuable brands reached approximately US$165 billion, up 26% from 2024. Kantar links the group's resilience to strong consumer relevance and clear differentiation rather than simply to participation in every cultural moment. The regional study includes Indonesia alongside five other Southeast Asian markets.
The useful brand question is therefore not only:
“What is popular right now?”
It is:
“Will what is popular strengthen the reason people choose us?”
Every Change Spends a Little Brand Memory
Brands are built through repetition.
A colour appears again. A packaging shape becomes familiar. A photographic language feels recognisable. A tone of voice develops a character. The product experience keeps confirming a similar promise.
Over time, customers learn to recognise the brand without consciously processing every element from the beginning.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute describes distinctive assets as cues that help trigger a brand in buyers' memories. Colours, shapes, characters and verbal elements take time and consistent reinforcement to build and maintain associations with a particular brand.
Kantar makes a similar point. Consistently deployed brand assets across channels and over time strengthen memory structures because each exposure reinforces previous encounters.
If an identity changes completely every time a trend changes, customers are repeatedly asked to learn the brand again.
Creator Content Makes the Problem Visible
The creator economy provides a useful example.
Kantar's Marketing Trends 2026 reports that coherent cross-channel ideas are 2.5 times more important to campaign success than they were a decade ago according to its LIFT+ database. Yet only about 27% of creator content in Kantar's data is strongly linked to the brand.
That does not mean creators should receive rigid scripts.
Kantar specifically argues that over-directing creators can destroy what makes them effective. The challenge is setting guardrails: enough freedom for creators to adapt authentically, without so much freedom that the brand disappears.
The same principle applies to trends.
Adaptation needs an anchor.
Decide What Stays Stable and What Can Move
A healthy brand system does not make everything permanent.
Instead, it distinguishes between core and expression.
As a GATICORP editorial framework:
Core — relatively stable
- product truth;
- customer promise;
- character;
- positioning;
- distinctive assets that already carry equity.
Expression — adaptable
- campaign themes;
- seasonal supporting colours;
- content formats;
- creator interpretation;
- collaborations;
- platform language;
- cultural references.
With that structure, brands do not need to choose between consistency and relevance.
They can pursue both.
Kantar describes cultural capital not as a collection of one-off moments, but as a network of associations repeatedly connected back to the brand's core identity through consistent assets and messaging.
A trend then becomes an expression of the brand—not its new identity.
Not All Consistency Is Good
There is a trap at the opposite extreme.
Brands can also become too afraid to change.
Consistency is not a justification for keeping an irrelevant product, a poor experience, a weak positioning or a visual language that no longer works.
Kantar itself stresses that successful brands need to adapt quickly while maintaining strong consumer connections. BrandZ 2026 also places Meaning, Difference and Salience together; distinctiveness alone is not enough if the brand is no longer meaningful.
So “do not follow every trend” does not mean “never change.”
The objective is to preserve the connection between each new change and the memory the brand has already spent years building.
Three Questions Before Following a Trend
Before changing packaging, joining a meme, adopting a new visual style or commissioning a creator collaboration, a brand can ask:
Is this genuinely relevant to our audience and their needs?
Does it strengthen—or at least avoid weakening—what we want to be known for?
If we removed the logo, would something still make this execution feel like us?
The final question matters.
Strong brands are not recognised only when their names and logos appear prominently. Identity begins to exist in the many small cues that have been repeated long enough to become familiar.
The objective is not to become the brand that reacts fastest to a changing world.
It is to remain recognisable while the world changes.
- 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Growth in an Insular World. Based on online interviews with 17,688 respondents across 15 countries conducted in April–May 2026. Used for the trust-and-relevance framework and the dimensions of utility, identity, community, emotional connection and pop-culture fluency. These global findings are not presented as Indonesia-specific consumer data.
- Edelman reports globally that 88% of respondents considered trusting a brand an important or critical purchase criterion, compared with 89% for quality and 88% for value. These figures are Edelman survey findings and are not Indonesian market statistics.
- Kantar BrandZ Most Valuable Southeast Asian Brands 2026. The B2C study covers Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam and draws on more than 120,000 respondents evaluating 2,050 brands across 85 categories. Used as regional context for relevance, difference, salience and brand-value growth.
- Kantar Marketing Trends 2026. Used for findings regarding the increasing importance of coherent cross-channel ideas to campaign success and the finding that only around 27% of creator content in Kantar's data is strongly tied to the brand. These findings come from Kantar datasets and research and are not treated as representative of all Indonesian campaigns or creator content.
- Kantar BrandZ 2026 — “The Long Game of Cultural Capital.” Used for the concept that cultural moments should connect back to core identity, distinctive assets and existing memory structures.
- Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. Used for the principle that distinctive assets need to be developed and protected over the long term and that consistency helps maintain associations between assets and brands in consumer memory.
- The Core = relatively stable / Expression = adaptable distinction is a GATICORP editorial framework, not an official Edelman, Kantar or Ehrenberg-Bass model.
- This article does not argue that brands should avoid all trends. Its argument is that trends should be selected for strategic relevance and integrated with the identity the brand has already built.
Published: October 11, 2026
