From Scroll to Shelf

For the better part of a decade, brand marketers have been locked in a relentless race: keep up with culture or risk irrelevance. The name of the game was reactivity. If a meme was trending, a moment was popping, or a phrase was going viral, brands were expected to jump in: fast, witty, and on-brand.

This gave rise to the era of trend-jacking, where social listening was used to fuel reactive content moments in culture. Success was measured in retweets, TikTok duets, and the elusive viral hit. But with the volumes of content being created per day, and the rise of AI-created output at speed, the game is changing, and brands need to get more and more ahead of it.

As a result, brands looking to lead in this will need to shift their approach - from no longer waiting for content to promote their product and create resonance, but bake talkability into their products from the start: Active Listening into R&D, way before a brief hits, helps them do so.

The Fatigue of Trend Chasing

Today, marketers are feeling the pressure of cultural velocity. The shelf life of relevance has become brutally short, and only a few master the art of this craft.

Beyond the logistical strain, there’s strategic fatigue. A clever tweet may win the internet for a few hours; but does it sell a product? Does it build brand equity? When consumers quickly move on to the next (think of rhode beauty who killed 2025’s ‘butter yellow’ with their ‘lemontini’ drop) often, the answer is no.

As a result, we’re seeing a shift. Rather than trying to outpace culture, brands are trying to understand it more deeply. They’re looking not just to reflect what’s happening now, but to predict what’s coming next and to embed that foresight directly into product development.

Active Listening: From listening for Engagement to pipelining Innovation

The evolution of social listening is powered by a new understanding of social media. It’s no longer a place where content goes, it’s where desire is created and articulated. Every swipe, share, and comment is a clue. Every micro-trend is a signal to something deeper, larger and more substantial. Social media has become a live laboratory of tastes, habits, and aspirations.

Social listening has long been used to inform content and campaign development. But now, active listening is being retooled as a strategic resource for innovation: helping brands identify unmet needs, emerging behaviors, and emotional cues that can shape not just messaging, but the products themselves.

This is the new model: 'From Scroll to Shelf'. Brands are no longer content to simply join the conversation. They want to design what people will be talking about next.

Dove x Crumbl: A Scent-Collab Baked in Culture

A standout example of this approach is the Dove x Crumbl collaboration. Dove noticed a shift in how Gen Z talked about showers online - no longer a purely functional routine, but a sensorial, self-care ritual driven by mood, scent, and indulgence. Simultaneously, Crumbl had cultivated a devoted fanbase obsessed with fun, indulgent and flavorful dessert experiences.

By pairing these fandoms, Dove launched its first-ever pink bottle in collaboration with Crumbl, featuring cookie-scented body washes driven and co-created by the social craze. It wasn’t just timely, it was engineered to feel inevitable. The collection sold out quickly, proving that relevance isn’t something to chase: it can be built in from the start.

From Ritual to Retail: Futurewise and the Rise of Skincare Culture

Futurewise offers another glimpse into the future of culturally driven product development. Built around the viral TikTok beauty ritual known as “slugging” where people apply heavy occlusive products to lock in moisture overnight, the brand didn’t just jump on a temporary beauty fad. It saw something deeper and validated a community practice, formalized it, and elevated it into a polished, shelf-ready product line.

By translating internet-native behavior into legitimate skincare solutions, Futurewise wasn’t just reacting to culture. It was acknowledging it and was giving consumers the tools to ritualise what they were already doing, in a smarter, safer way.

Trend-to-tea: How Sprite met communities within their shared digital behaviors

When TikTok users began mixing Sprite with various teas as a refreshing DIY beverage hack, the brand took notice. Instead of treating the trend as a passing fad, Sprite tapped social listening to study how and why this behavior was resonating. What they saw was a broader cultural shift: consumers weren’t just experimenting with flavor, they were crafting personal, craveable refreshment experiences in real time. The Sprite team acted quickly, translating the behavior into a real-world product: Sprite + Tea, a bottled drink combining crisp lemon-lime soda with subtle tea infusions.

By bridging social insight with product development, Sprite didn’t just validate a trend: it turned a behavior into a mainstream beverage, engineered for both cultural relevance and commercial success.

Home Goods: SharkNinja’s Socially-Inspired Innovation

SharkNinja, maker of household staples, has evolved its R&D product development model around deep consumer and social insight. The Ninja FlexFlame grill emerged after spotting consistent social chatter about a gap in home appliance versatility. Consumers were expressing desire for flexible cooking setups, indoor and outdoor, SharkNinja translated into a single multifunctional product they knew would sell.

By investing heavily in social and creator platforms (with a reported $700m+ annual marketing spend), SharkNinja ensures its engineers hear the real voice of the user long before a product brief is written. Listening consistently allows them to move beyond incremental iteration toward consumer-driven innovation, turning what people talk about into products that buzzes by solving real needs.

From Trend-Tracking to Culture-Building

What ties these examples together is a mindset shift. The best marketers today aren’t trying to guess what TikTok will obsess over next week. Instead, they’re using social insight to understand where culture is heading; and they’re building products that lead.

Social platforms remain powerful sources of cultural intelligence. But what’s new is how brands are applying those insights proactively, not reactively: from trend-chasing to cultural forecasting. From short-term stunts to long-term resonance. From scroll to shelf.

In this new model, social and pop culture aren’t just influence: they’re infrastructure. The smartest brands are no longer reacting to culture. They’re building with it.