How to decide whether to join a TikTok trend

A brand that sells a 12-week meal-planning program — a plan, a shopping system, a weekly check-in — has a trend in front of it. Somebody on the team kept seeing the same setup and passed it around with "can we do this one?"

Everyone can already picture the shoot. Same pacing, same cut, the product sitting where the other thing was.

That part is easy, and it's not the decision. Nobody has checked whether there's a place in it for what they sell.

What this guide covers

• What are you actually looking at?
• What can't move?
• What is the open place for?
• Does your product do that job?
• Does getting closer to the original help?
• So you're not joining. What does that leave you?
• What do you send the creator when the answer is yes?
• Frequently asked questions

What are you actually looking at?

Two things, and they come apart.

One is the trend. A lot of people are posting the same thing right now. That's a fact about this week, and it's what puts the question on the table at all — nobody walks into a meeting about something nobody is posting.

The other is the meme format underneath it: the repeatable structure people recognize on sight. That's not a fact about this week. It was legible before the trend picked it up, and it stays legible once the trend passes.

Strictly, you don't join a trend. You join the meme format underneath it. What the trend adds is that enough people have just seen the structure for the recognition to be there at all, which is why doing it now is worth something.

Keeping those apart is what makes the rest of this possible, because they answer to different questions. Whether people are posting it right now is something you can see. Whether there's room in it for you is something you have to work out.

One decision this isn't: choosing the content format — what the video has to communicate, and how it should look to do that. The structure sits inside whichever one you picked. Settle that separately and don't let it stand in for this.

What can't move?

Write down the parts that, if you changed them, would stop people from recognizing it.

For the structure sitting in front of the meal-planning brand, there are four lines:

• The plan comes first, in full. The person lays out the elaborate thing they were going to do, in their own words.
• The cut is hard. No transition, no "so anyway."
• The replacement is shown, not described. You see it. Nobody narrates it.
• Nobody acknowledges the gap. The moment someone in the video comments on the difference, it's a different video.

The way to get this list is subtraction. Collecting gives you what the examples have in common — a kitchen, a certain time of day, roughly the same length — and most of that is coincidence. Subtraction asks what you could take away before people stop recognizing it, and the answer is a much shorter list.

The two moves land in different places. Every example of this structure happens to be shot indoors. Move it outdoors and people still recognize it instantly. Let the person say "anyway, I gave up" over the cut and they don't.

What is the open place for?

Plenty of things vary between versions — the room, the wording, how long the last shot holds. One of them carries what the structure pays off in, and that's the one this decision is about. Here it's what the replacement is.

You work out what it's for by reading the originals the way you're about to read your own. This structure pays off in recognition: the viewer thinks yeah, that's what I'd have done. Recognition needs the replacement to be something they would in fact have reached for. So the job of that place is to hold the shortcut the viewer would also have taken, and no other part of the structure can hold it. The plan sets up the distance, the hard cut delivers that distance, and the rule against acknowledging the gap keeps anyone from explaining it away.

Naming that job is the step that gets skipped, and the job is what the next question checks against.

Book a demo →

Does your product do that job?

Put it in the open place and read the video back to yourself.

The meal-planning brand sells 12 weeks of structure: a plan, a shopping system, a weekly check-in. Drop that in and the video says I was going to finally get my eating under control. Hard cut. A 12-week program with weekly check-ins.

Now ask the only question this place answers to: is that what the viewer would have reached for? Signing up for 12 weeks isn't something anyone does instead. It's something you decide on, compare, and pay for. It sits on the same side as the plan, so the recognition the open place exists to produce never arrives.

Note what doesn't rescue it: making the plan bigger. Write the plan as a year of Sunday meal-prep and macro-counting and the replacement is still a signup. The job was never to be smaller than the plan. It's to be the thing the viewer would have reached for, and that's a fact about what you sell.

That's the answer.

Notice what the check needed: what the open place is for, and a plain sentence about what you sell. No numbers, no budget, and nothing you'd have had to commission.

Does getting closer to the original help?

No, and the reason is worth being exact about.

Say the brand shoots it anyway and gets everything right — the pacing, the hard cut, nobody acknowledging the gap, a set that could pass for any of the others. All of that work does one thing: it tells the viewer this is that structure.

And once they know which structure they're watching, the open place is the only thing left to read. Everything else is confirmation — the fixed parts are fixed across every version they've already seen. So the better you match, the more precisely you've aimed them at the one place that isn't doing its job.

Two things follow from that, and they're separate. The mismatch gets easier to see, for the reason just given. And it doesn't get any smaller, because it was never in the execution to begin with.

So you're not joining. What does that leave you?

A fact about your product that was already true before anyone opened the app.

You can still get the product on screen — put it in the plan, put it in the caption, have the account post it. It isn't in the structure then. Being in the trend means the product does the work the structure needs done; anywhere else in the frame it's set dressing in somebody else's video.

The program's whole value is that it's the thing you commit to. That is the opposite of the job the open place does, and it's not a shortfall you can write around. A tighter brief doesn't move it. Neither does a different cut. A caption explaining how the product connects just relocates the mismatch into the caption — and a version that has to explain itself is pointing at the structure from outside rather than standing in it.

The good news is that you can read those terms off the videos, so the answer arrives before you've booked anyone.

The open place is still there for whoever sells the shortcut. That's who it was for.

Book a demo →

What do you send the creator when the answer is yes?

Sooner or later a meme format comes back a yes. What this decision hands over then is two things: the four lines that can't move, and your product in the open place. Those are the parts you'd ask for a change over, which is the test what belongs in a brief sets. The brief carries other things the structure has no say in; this decision doesn't add to them.

Everything else is theirs. What the plan actually is, how they say it, what the room looks like, how long they hold the last shot. A creator fluent in the structure makes judgment calls in there you wouldn't have known to ask for.

Send the reference video instead of the list and you've asked them to reproduce someone else's execution, which throws all of that away.

If a draft comes back and something feels off, sort what you're actually asking for before you send notes. A change to one of your four lines, or to what goes in the open place, is on the list you handed them. Whether anything else is a fair ask is a different judgment, and this decision doesn't settle it.

And once it's posted, whether it did its job is read against what you wrote down beforehand. How big the trend got answers a different question.

Frequently asked questions

Can't we put the product in the plan instead, and let something else be the replacement?

You can shoot that video. It isn't your campaign.

The plan is the thing being left behind — that's what the structure needs it for. Put your product there and you've paid a creator to say they were going to use it and then didn't. If the replacement is something else entirely, the video belongs to whatever fills that place, and your product is scenery.

The creator brought us the trend. Does that change the check?

Whether your product does that job is a fact about your product, and who spotted the trend has no bearing on that.

What it should change is who you ask about the fixed parts. Someone who posts in it every week is inside the structure, and some of what holds it together isn't visible from outside. Ask them for that list while you're still deciding.

Can we send it to a creator and see how the draft comes out?

That's a reasonable instinct, and a draft still can't settle it. A draft shows you one execution. What you're asking about is the pairing of your product with the structure, and every execution shares that.

And if the draft arrives with the replacement still not being what anyone would have reached for, there's nothing to send back. The creator didn't get anything wrong. You'd be asking them to fix a decision that was made before they were hired.

See what this looks like for your brand

Got a trend in front of you and no read on whether you're actually in it? We'll go through it with you.

Popow designs evidence-backed meme-format candidates matched to what is actually trending on the FYP.

Book a demo →

Or email us: business@popow.ai