TREND RADAR #3

Sydney Sweeney & Subtle Sustainability

Before getting to this week’s edition of Trend Radar, which focuses on nature-related trends, I wanted to share some thoughts about the whole Sydney Sweeney debacle. I’m usually adamant about avoiding marketing-topic-of-the-week discourse in this newsletter, because those takes tend to get irritatingly repetitive. But I’m making an exception, since American Eagle’s ‘Great Jeans’ campaign is the undoubtedly the boldest brand move we’ve seen tapping into the trend towards conservative aesthetics, which I call Regressive Nostalgia, and it seems to have backfired badly.

In the Washington Post,

Rachel Seville Tashjian

literally calls it “regressive,” and asks “Should teenagers be served a vision of sexuality and fashion that feels so regressive?”

Snippet of the Washington Post

But I disagree with Tashjian’s ending takeaway, which suggests that “The only thing we can say for sure: the “success” of this ad — stirring controversy and conversation and the big stock jump — will inspire more brands to try the same.” In my opinion, this campaign’s rage bait virality and meme-stock bump are heavily overshadowed by significant damage to the AE’s credibility with its target customers, who flooded social media with negative reactions.

Screenshot via After School

AE’s inability to provide a comment for Adweek’s followup article about the backlash, and decision to take down the most controversial video, suggests they somehow did not expect this negativity —rage bait was not the strategy. And why would it be? That’s not their ethos. This same campaign would have made sense for other brands, like Calvin Klein or Abercrombie, which have a history of stoking controversy with hyper-sexualized denim advertising.

American Eagle

spent the past decade building significant brand equity with Gen Z around an inclusivity-oriented positioning, particularly via Aerie, which used this approach to win market share from Victoria’s Secret and become AE'’s fast growing division. Following that with such a drastic reverse-course obviously left their young female customers blindsided. It doesn’t really matter at all whether you personally feel the eugenics claims are accurate or overblown, intentionally stoking controversy or unintentionally misconstrued, because the end result is the same: the brand alienated their core demographic. That’s not a beneficial long-term business strategy.

The AE campaign gives credence to the trend industry’s resistance to talking about this conservative shift when it emerged last year, which I discussed in the original Regressive Nostalgia post. But it also proves, as I said in January, feigning ignorance can’t stop a cultural trend — because brands will eventually and inevitably tap in without fully understanding the implications. And the follow-on consumer backlash confirms another point I made towards the end of this essay:

I do think it’s interesting to contemplate how Gen Z’s response to this shift may change as it becomes clear that it is accompanied by policy and not just aesthetics.

Rina Nicolae

posed the possibility (in Notes) that Regressive Nostalgia “would quickly die out as the Trump admin would prove to be a dumpster fire” and asked “Does this attitude have staying power or are we on the verge of something new?” In last week’s Trend Radar, I mentioned that signal tracking confirms cultural sentiment continues to feel more skewed towards conservatism over change. Now, I’m also wondering whether we’ve already passed the peak of Regressive Nostalgia.

But brands usually follow on later because it takes some time to execute concepts, which means there may be more Regressive Nostalgia -coded campaigns to come. And overall, I don’t think this trend will die out so quickly. It’ll be more like an unpredictable fizzle, returning to a low flame that could easily be reignited if circumstances aligned.

It’s fascinating to observe the difference between how the past decade’s progressive-coded trends gained popular momentum and drove sales when leveraged in business contexts, whereas brands seem confounded by how to manage the current conservative cultural shift. AE’s campaign completely misunderstands that the sociopolitical sentiments of Gen Z men differ significantly from those of Gen Z women, who are the primary target for 65% of its assortment.

This American Eagle debacle validates the value of trend strategy. The trad wife trend is not the same as a “trend” like ‘tomato girl summer.’ The first is deeply influenced by sociopolitical drivers, while the other is a superficial aesthetic fad. It’s clearly important for brands to understand the difference: you can't tap into the semiotics of conservatism and expect consumers to believe it's innocuous.

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Trend Radar #3

Today’s Trend Radar shares a few of the 43 recent database signals influenced by the Nature drivers space in the framework, which includes three macrotrends: Natural Embrace, Bioadaptive Balance, and Intelligent Resilience

Macrotrend Framework

[EMERGING] Subtle Sustainability

I want to first address that there’s been a palpable overall shift away from sustainability in culture over the past year. I’m very curious if everyone else has noticed this too? It felt like my media feeds quickly went from being filled with exciting environment-focused innovations to a barren lack of any interesting developments. I really have to make a concerted effort now to seek out the types of signals I’ve included below. The summary at the end speaks to this: I cataloged 199 cultural signals over the past four weeks, and only 43 were tagged as influenced by Nature drivers, which is significantly lower than the other drivers spaces.¹

It seems like people are experiencing a sort of eco-fatigue, which is an understandable evolution of eco-anxiety.

Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick

discussed this sentiment last week with sustainability advocate Leah Thomas, who pointed out:

I think the [environmental] movement’s in a weird place because it's kind of hard to think about the carbon in the atmosphere when people are getting fired left and right, when basic human needs aren't being met.

LSN Global argues that consumers still want brands to implement environmentally responsible business practices, but not framed as a selling point, more of table stakes, like an invisible expectation. I call it ‘subtle sustainability’ — less greenwashing, more effort where it actually matters: behind-the-scenes (and keep the receipts).