Ever wonder how some brands always seem ahead of the curve, jumping on the next big thing before everyone else? Their secret is something called trend spotting. The practice of identifying emerging trends before they hit the mainstream. 

Trend spotting is more valued than ever, as social media reacts to anything at lightning speed. Tapping into digital marketing trends (from unexpected collaborations to the use of AI) helps keep brands ahead of the game. 

This guide explores what trend spotting is and how to do it well. We'll look at social listening tools that help pinpoint rising topics. We'll also share tips on staying ahead of the curve, like analyzing consumer behavior data, monitoring online conversations, and tapping into customer feedback. 

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What is trend spotting?

Trend spotting is the art of noticing emerging patterns in culture, consumer behavior, or market data before they become widespread. It's about catching the early signals. Those subtle shifts in conversations or metrics that hint at a coming change. 

For marketers, trend spotting means observing and analyzing data (from social media buzz to sales figures to search interest) to predict what's next and act on it before the trend peaks. Software like Brandwatch Consumer Research helps marketers pull insights from millions of online sources through advanced social listening and analytics. It can also incorporate search data from Trajaan to spot emerging trends and issues before they surface in the media or on social. 

It's all about being able to spot emerging trends and align your campaigns or product choices with where consumer interest is headed rather than playing catch-up. In short, trend spotting gives businesses a proactive edge in staying relevant and competitive. 

Why trend spotting matters in 2026

Staying ahead of consumer and industry trends has always been useful, but heading into 2026, it's absolutely critical. We live in an era of information overload and instant communication, where a single viral post can spark a global movement. 

Noticing trends like Gen Z's shoe obsession or anticipating the changing tastes in the food and beverage space can transform businesses. You might not want or need to jump on every trend emerging from social platforms, but you need to know what's going on. 

Trend spotting acts like an early warning system for your brand. Here are three big reasons it matters: 

First-mover advantage: Spotting a trend early lets you act before others. Launching a product or campaign that aligns with an emerging trend can win you market share and media attention while others scrambled to catch up. 

Agility and strategic planning: Trend spotting makes your business more agile. It injects current consumer insight into your planning process, so you're basing decisions on where the market is going. If data shows your customers gravitating toward eco-friendly products or a new social platform, you can pivot or innovate accordingly. This approach improves resilience because you're less likely to be blindsided by change. 

Avoiding overkill: Not all trends are good, and you don't have to jump on every one. When a hashtag, image, or anything else goes viral, brands must choose whether to jump on or not. If everyone goes big on the trend, it risks overkill. This happened in 2024 with the "Very Demure" trend that crashed as sharply as it had risen.  

Savvy brands can use trend spotting software like Brandwatch to determine whether or not to jump on a trend. There are reputational risks associated with trend jumping, so making an informed decision is paramount. 

How to approach trend spotting strategically

Successful trend spotting requires a systematic approach. You need the right framework to ensure you're not missing opportunities. 

The four-tiered monitoring approach

For general trend analysis, a wide net is needed to capture all potential opportunities. This means tracking trends across four key areas: 

  1. Industry or vertical: Monitor broader sector conversations 
  2. Brand or organization: Track direct mentions and branded conversations 
  3. Products or services: Follow specific product-related discussions 
  4. Consumers (all-encompassing): Capture unbranded conversations relevant to your space 

Being able to track trends across all four pillars means that even if someone hasn't mentioned your brand, you'll still pick up on important trends. Many organizations make the mistake of only tracking branded mentions, but the most valuable insights often come from broader conversations where consumers discuss their needs without naming specific brands. 

The stress and anxiety that comes with trend spotting is valid. There's pressure on companies to be trend spotting 24/7 so as not to miss out on any opportunities. That said, regular insights are essential. Trend spotting is a journey, not a destination. You can't do it once and say "I've trend spotted." 

The cadence depends on your industry, team, and the people who can action the insights. Schedule trend analysis to coincide with when stakeholders meet and decisions can actually be made. Don't over-do trend spotting reports if nothing will come of them. Instead, create them when your team has the capacity to take insights and make real change as a result. 

But, as you’ll learn in the ‘Alerts and Signals’ section below, there are ways of staying abreast of trends without even being logged into a trend spotting platform. 

Identifying trends today means leveraging data from the places trends emerge, and online conversations are a great place to start. 

Social listening for real-time insights

Social listening involves tracking online conversations on social media, forums, blogs, and other platforms to see what topics are gaining momentum. An AI-powered social listening tool like Brandwatch Consumer Research scans millions of posts to find patterns humans might miss. 

For example, you might discover an uptick in chatter about a new skincare ingredient or a hashtag starting to trend within your industry. Those early signals give you a chance to investigate and respond. 

Social listening doesn't just tally mentions. It also provides context by showing what people actually say and feel. This deeper level of sentiment analysis helps you understand why the trend is happening and how it connects to your brand. 

Setting up Alerts and Signals for proactive monitoring

With Brandwatch's Alerts and Signals, you can track the entire conversation even when you're not logged in. 

Custom Alerts let you predefine what you want to be alerted about. For example, you could set one up so that you and any other key stakeholders can be notified any time there's a mention of your brand name in a specific context. Or you might be alerted when there's a post from an account with more than 10,000 followers that mentions your product. 

Signals pick up on trends you couldn't have expected. The technology analyzes your data in real time, sending an email alert to your specified recipients as soon as it detects significant or sudden changes in your data, such as trending stories and authors, or shifts in sentiment.  

While Custom Alerts search for things you might already be aware of, Signals detect changes in the data you might never have been able to plan for or predict. 

Spotting trends around your own brand or product is relatively straightforward with the right setup. You can exam the conversation around them with the topic cloud component in Brandwatch Consumer Research, which will surface key phrases, keywords, hashtags, emojis, people, or places that are being mentioned a lot. 

You can even do some trend spotting with a simple line chart. Brandwatch's AI assistant Iris is great at picking out short-term trends and the distinct driving forces behind conversation spikes. 

A little more complicated is spotting trends that come out of the blue. While these are harder to find, they're equally valuable. For instance, consumers might create a homeopathic or natural remedy with a new name that didn't exist before. Unless you were monitoring conversations broadly (not just about your own or known competitor brands), you wouldn't pick it up. 

Picking up unknown trends starts with a broad query that looks at your sector and your product types. Then you can use the same tools mentioned above: topic clouds, line charts, Alerts, and especially Signals to catch the unexpected and delve deeper. 

When thinking about known and unknown places for trends to originate, it's important to think about physical spaces as well as demographic groups or online communities. 

Brandwatch has access to over 100 million sources. This means we can track trends emerging all over the world in many languages. It might not sound important to do so if your business only operates in the US, but previous research has found that some regions are more influential than others in starting trends. 

When searching for trends broadly, cast the net as wide as possible. In Brandwatch, that might mean turning off location filters and writing queries in multiple languages. 

Looking for trends among a general audience is one way to trend spot, but what if you want to look at trending topics among a particular consumer group? 

Social Panels in Consumer Research make it easy. For example, if your target audience is UK-based accountants, you might perform a search within Social Panels to filter authors by those that have "accountant" or "accounting" within their bio, that are categorized as an individual account (as opposed to an organization), and are located in the UK. 

With this panel set up, you can begin to look at what's trending within conversations your target audience is having online. This is great for content strategy, but also to spot general trends in what your audience cares about and is getting fired up by. You can do this analysis over years, months, weeks, days, hours, or minutes, depending on what you're looking for. 

Using historical data for predictive trend spotting

There's always a risk with predictions. The usual example is life expectancy: even with all the smart people that work on it and the data science that goes in, there's still a margin of error. But that doesn't mean there is no value in prediction. 

The nature of trends, particularly on social media, is fickle. Successful predictive trend spotting relies on identifying what's going to stick around. Every trend spotted should be scrutinized. Is there a lot of spam in the conversation? Who is it being driven by? 

Using historical data can help with predictive trend spotting. With Brandwatch Consumer Research, you can look at up to ten years of historical data on any brand, product, or topic. By pairing this with other datasets, you can establish patterns and potential cause-and-effect relationships. With these identified, you know what signs to look for when trying to predict outcomes in the future. 

Here's a simple example: looking at conversation around sun protection products alongside sun hours in the UK can reveal a pattern between the amount of sun people experienced and their interest in sun protection. 

Armed with this information, sun protection brands can use weather forecasting to plan future social activations. They can also delve into the topics people are talking about within sun protection discussion to find out what those activations should focus on and even pass this information on to product teams (for example, if there are ingredients consumers are talking about positively). 

Using trend insights in marketing strategies

Spotting a trend is only half the battle. You also need to act on it. Here's how trend insights can inform your strategies: 

Content and campaigns

Trend insights can spark timely, relevant marketing campaigns. If a topic or meme is trending and it fits your brand, you might create a quick social media post or a blog article to join the conversation. 

If you know a big trend is coming up (perhaps because an event is on the horizon), then you can plan ahead and create a strategy to jump on it. Trend marketing aims to boost engagement because you're tapping into what your audience is already interested in. Just make sure your brand's take is authentic and adds value. 

Knowing what's trending can also guide other marketing efforts, like ad targeting and influencer partnerships. 

Branding and visuals

Not all trends are about people, products, and events. Some existing trends lurk in the background, like branding and styling. Think font, color, or even cinematography. 

It's important to strike the right balance between long-term visual trends and short-term spikes, of course. And copying other brands isn’t the best strategy. But using trend analysis you might get an idea of how to shoot a particular video or present a piece of content in a way that’s authentic to your brand and that fits with your audience’s current tastes. 

Product development

Trends should influence what you offer and how you operate. If your trend spotting efforts reveal a shift toward, say, sustainable materials or a new technology, use that industry insight in your product development. Maybe it's time to launch an eco-friendly line or integrate a popular new feature into your app before your competitors do. 

Business decisions

You can use trend data to validate bigger moves like entering a new market or pivoting your business model. Align your long-term strategy with evolving consumer preferences so you're always a step ahead. A tool like Brandwatch Consumer Research is useful here because you can make business decisions based on real data and analysis rather than hunches. 

Trend spotting tips for 2026

Trends never stand still, which means trend spotting is an ongoing effort. Here are a few tactics to help you stay ahead: 

Analyze your customer data

Look to your own customer data to spot unusual upticks or patterns in your sales, web analytics, or search queries. Cross-reference this with trend spotting data from your chosen software to see if there's a correlation. A spike in interest or purchases around a certain product or topic could hint at a broader trend. 

Monitor online chatter consistently

Keep an eye on discussions across social media, online communities, and review sites.  

Don't forget that often a trend can start in a niche forum before hitting the bigger social platforms. 

Listen to customer feedback

Pay attention to reviews, surveys, and customer service interactions. Collate your data and analyze it to see what relevant trends emerge. If multiple customers start requesting the same thing or pointing out the same issue, they might be illuminating the next trend or need your business should address. 

Don't jump on every trend

Brands can kill trends when they jump on them too heavily. A hashtag, meme, or TikTok dance video may go viral, only for brands to muscle in and flood timelines with the same content. 

Ensure you track early trends and make a call on whether they align with your brand or not. Don't just jump on every trend. Social media users are unforgiving if they sense you're being disingenuous. 

Be cautious about "the unknown"

Often, trend spotting will start by searching for things you might already be aware of. Remember to cast the net broad to open up the possibility of trends emerging from unexpected places. 

By being proactive with these practices, you'll build a "trend radar" for your brand. Over time, distinguishing fleeting fads from meaningful trends will become second nature. 

Start trend spotting today

Trend spotting in 2026 is all about using software to track emerging conversations before they become mainstream. Reacting to trends is no longer good enough. Marketers need to anticipate the next big thing, interpret it in a way that’s authentic to their brand, and jump on board before the trend burns out. 

If you want to stay ahead of the curve, lean into trends that suit your brand, and avoid reputational damage from jumping on bandwagons too late, then Brandwatch Consumer Research is the tool for you.