Taste > trends
Rethinking social intelligence for the algorithmic era
Our newest guest essay comes from the brain of Dejaih Smith, social media trend analyst and writer for Silence, Brand! and Senior Social Community Manager at Sony Pictures Entertainment for Jeopardy! & Wheel of Fortune. Here, she dives into why brands need to invest in cultural permeance instead of just chasing trends.
It may be the Year of the Horse, but, for brands, 2026 is the Year of the Tastemaker.
The internet is entering a new era of cultural gatekeepers.
Celebrities and mega influencers may still headline commercials, but micro-creators and communities are shaping what’s next in culture.
Why do you think we’ve seen a rise in micro influencers and niche communities like Anime going mainstream?
Before a trend reaches the masses, it usually begins as a whisper inside niche communities—an aesthetic experiment, a fandom reference or a meme circulating without context. These early signals rarely appear in trend reports.
They emerge when people materialize their taste.
According to Pinterest’s Pinterest Predicts 2026 report, this year will be shaped by nonconformity, self-preservation and escapism. In practice, that means the era of cookie-cutter aesthetics, perfectly curated feeds and “safe” brand voices is quietly fading. What’s rising instead is hyper-personalization, maximalist expression and a remix of Gen Z and Millennial nostalgia.
For brands navigating this algorithmic era, understanding how taste forms may be more valuable than chasing trends.
Trends move fast, but they don’t (always) move culture
Brands currently move at the speed of spectacle.
Over the last year, microdramas and rage bait (as coined by Oxford) helped dictate that pace.
Online culture—pre-algorithmic speed—had us stuck on a viral topic for at least a month.
Now, you’ve got new memes mushrooming nearly every 12 hours from every end of the internet. One day away feels like a whole week.
Brands trying to adapt to this lightning pace are moving beyond creative, instead focusing on monitoring trends and cultural agility.
In the latest Sprout Social Index™, 40% of consumers say they think it’s cool when brands jump on viral trends. At the same time, 33% say it’s embarrassing. If your brand hops on after the first 24 to 48 hours of a trend’s lifespan, you better be using spectacle as your main KPI.
So, if trends move fast, what truly sticks?
Think of it in terms of cooking.
When cooking, what lingers isn’t the flame. It’s the fond stuck at the bottom of your pan.
The fond is the browned bits left behind in the pan after you’ve got a good sear. A true chef doesn’t discard it. They build on it. They know there is depth there. That’s where flavor compounds.
Trends are the heat from a flame. Taste is the fond.
One heats things up. The other is the base for your strategy’s secret sauce.
A chef who only chases flame burns the dish. A chef who understands the base builds something layered.
Brands that rely on trends are cooking on high heat. Brands that understand taste know how to build flavor.
This is how you match the taste of your intended audience and establish cultural fluency.
The cultural systems behind trends
While there are tastemakers who seem to set the trends, curating taste is a process. It’s developed through experience with a subject and chosen as a part of the curator’s personhood.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, cultural researchers and marketers referred to these figures as “merchants of cool”—individuals whose personal style, references and social proximity to emerging scenes helped translate niche signals into broader cultural awareness.
Today, those same dynamics play out online through a new generation of aesthetic curators.
TikTok creators like @nohofashion and @girlsinquire function less like traditional influencers and more like cultural samplers.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Their feeds operate like living moodboards—closer to the collage logic of Polyvore than the polished, aspirational posts that defined the latest era of social media.
They gather references, remix aesthetics, and contextualize signals across fashion, art, media, and internet subcultures that will go on to empower consumers’ buying power.
In doing so, they help audiences practice taste in real time: sampling, comparing and ultimately deciding what resonates.
Just as brands did decades ago, brands today need to tap into these communities to establish cultural relevance. Don’t go chasing algorithms alone. Algorithms may shape behavior by accelerating what people see, but they don’t create the meaning behind those signals. Understand the micro-communities where taste is actively being formed and collaborate with them intentionally.
This will help brands plant themselves into their audience’s lifestyle, versus just being a 24-hour trending topic.
Communities are the new cultural infrastructure
Algorithms may be digital matchmakers, but they often rush the experience that leads to establishing taste. They surface products, pair audiences with creators, and shorten the path between discovery and purchase. What gets lost in that frictionless loop is the process that ushers users to actually develop taste.
Micro-communities restore that missing layer. Within niche internet spaces—from fashion commentary circles to fandom forums—taste is debated, refined and protected collectively.
These spaces function less like storefronts and more like cultural third places, where people gather to interpret what something means before deciding whether it’s worth adopting. In these environments, products and aesthetics aren’t simply promoted. They’re evaluated through shared critique.
This dynamic is also why psychographics are becoming more valuable than demographics. Age, gender and location reveal very little about why someone chooses one product over another. Understanding the communities they participate in, the references they recognize, the aesthetics they gravitate toward and the creators they trust reveals the cultural logic behind their decisions.
For brands, these communities act as living research environments. Observing how taste forms inside them offers a deeper form of social intelligence that algorithmic signals alone cannot capture.
Designing brands that earn cultural permanence
Cultural permanence isn’t achieved by appearing in every trending moment. In this personalized algorithmic era, brands need to rethink what social intelligence actually means. You’ve got to develop a deeper understanding of the communities shaping meaning around your products, aesthetics and ideas.
That takes sharp social listening and cultural strategy. Instead of treating culture as a stream of viral moments to react to, brands should approach online communities as environments where taste is continuously forming.
Here’s how you’ll engage with intention going forward:
Study communities before participating: Observe how people talk, critique and reference culture before inserting your brand into the conversation.
Prioritize psychographics over demographics: Understanding shared values, aesthetics and cultural signals will reveal far more than surface-level audience segments.
Design for resonance, not just reach: Niche virality—a smaller audience that recognizes your brand as culturally fluent—will prove to be more valuable than the viral exposure we’ve been getting accustomed to chasing.
This is how your brand will earn its place in culture.
Taste is cultivated, not chased
Algorithms can accelerate discoverability, but they don’t create meaning.
Meaning forms inside communities, through curators, shared references and the collective process of deciding what resonates.
For brands, that means social intelligence can’t stop at tracking viral moments.
The brands that earn cultural permanence will be the ones that study taste where it forms, engage communities with intention and design for resonance rather than reach.
Because long after the trend fades, the flavor of your brand is what people remember.
 | A guest post by
|