For Gen Z and Millennials across the UK and the Anglosphere, the traditional “property ladder” has lost a few rungs, replaced with a steep monthly direct debit to a private landlord. The average first-time buyer is now 33.9 years old, up from 30.3 in 2007, and puts down a deposit of around £61,000. Saving that while renting takes around 28 months' worth of rent in most areas, and up to three years in London. No wonder 52% of first-time buyers got help from the Bank of Mum and Dad in 2024, to the tune of £9.6bn.

Homeownership now feels less and less like an attainable adult milestone. Six in ten British renters believe they'll never be able to afford a home, and the share of 18–24 renters who think ownership is out of reach for good has climbed from 12% to 19% in five years. Ownership among under-35 households has actually risen over the last decade. But "eventually, probably, with family help, in your mid-thirties" is a very different world from the one their Gen X, bought-it-and-had-a-baby-by-25, parents had. After all, if skipping your morning flat white still won’t even buy you a front door, what is the actual point?

However far from sinking into passive despair, young renters are still trying to have agency in spaces they can’t own, so, if you can’t be a Homeowner, you become a Host.

The “Host” as the Ultimate Cultural Flex

Despite popular media narratives claiming Gen Z is a prudish, anti-social cohort of screen-addicts who don’t drink, don’t party, and don’t leave their rooms, I think something much more nuanced and fun is happening. Blocked from traditional third spaces by the cost-of-living, young people aren’t giving up on connection.

With the average pint now costing £5.34, or £6.55 in London, and restaurants enforcing strict 90-minute table turnarounds, it's no surprise that 61% of 18–30s say they're going out less than a year ago, and 42% of Gen Z say money limits their social lives. So, I believe the party has moved indoors. 63% of young Europeans would rather gather at someone's house than go out, and nearly half of UK 18–34s are hosting more often than they were five years ago.

In 2026, hosting is a status symbol, and a bit of a lost art. It’s all about flexing your soft skills and exposing your cultural capital.

Being a host requires an increasingly rare set of interpersonal skills. A successful host must have the cultural sensitivity to read the room, curate guest lists that don’t clash, steer clear of conversational friction, and design an environment where people feel safe enough to drop their guards.

The lasting success of books like Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering, or deep-question card games like We’re Not Really Strangers, suggests there’s a desire for an external architecture to these events that needs to be relearned.

Drifting through an overwhelming digital landscape, a status symbol like hosting is deeply appealing because it’s non-material. Building a functioning, healthy, regular in-person social life (and maybe capturing it for the feed) is worthy of showing off to a generation starved of traditional stability and connection.

From Equity to Agency

For previous generations, the financial incentive of housing was clear, if you pay off a mortgage, you build equity, and lock down ultimate control over your domain. For the long-term-rental generation, equity is off the table, which leaves agency as their aspirational ideal.

Things have been changing a little, since May 2026, in the UK the Renters’ Rights Act has ended no-fault evictions and made it harder for landlords to refuse pets. However, security isn’t the same as self-expression. When you still aren’t allowed to knock down walls, mount shelves, or paint the hallway without forfeiting your security deposit, how do you claim real ownership over your space? You host.

Homeowners host too, of course, but renters have the most to gain from it. Creating an intentional event (a themed dinner party, a makeshift espresso bar on a Sunday morning, or a competitive PowerPoint presentation night) is a temporary takeover of space. It transforms a sterile, whitewashed flatshare into a space that you have complete control of. You don’t own the square footage, but for four hours on a Friday night, you control the atmosphere, the playlist, the lighting, and the guest list.

Doom Spending

When an entire generation collectively realises they'll likely never afford a £226k starter home (£472k in London), their financial mindset undergoes a fundamental shift. Enter the era of doom spending. The logic is “If the economy is broken and I won’t buy a home anyway, I might as well spend my disposable income enjoying my life right now.”

In fact, two thirds of UK 18–34s admit to buying themselves little treats more often when they're feeling low, and US research shows that as homes become less affordable, young people save less and spend more.

They aren’t saving for a deposit, but they are spending on pieces to impress when they welcome guests into their home. They’re dropping discretionary income on aesthetic thrifted glassware, mood lighting, niche board games, and conversation-starting interior pieces that make their rented spaces feel more like them.

Design for the Host, Not the Homeowner

Property developers, interior brands, and marketers who continue to treat young residents merely as passive “delivery points” for parcels and food apps are missing the emotional shift entirely.

Their rented spaces have become a place for self-expression and social survival. Young renters are relocating their public lives behind their front doors because it’s the only place left where they can control the budget and the vibe.

Some brands already get it. Waitrose published a full hosting guide covering guest lists, menus and table styling, while in the US, HelloFresh sold a Galentine's hosting kit with a table runner, candles, tarot cards and an apron. In London's rental buildings, the amenities getting booked out are private dining rooms and host kitchens, built for the birthday dinner a one-bed flat can't hold.

The takeaway for the market is obvious. Start designing for the Host. Sell them the agency, the tools, the aesthetic, and the conditions to gather, entertain, and reclaim adulthood on their own terms.

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

I gave it a price range, an area, and a list of things that were dealbreakers. I got it to cross referece things like was it north facing, sound pollution, even whether there was a yoga or pilates studio close enough to walk to. It came back with a shortlist. I then went to viewings and decided for myself.

The last time I moved, hunting for a flat, I did it the old way. Hours on Rightmove. Then Zoopla, then OnTheMarket, then every property site known to man. Squinting at floorplans at 1am, zooming into photos trying to work out if that was likely damp or just a shadow.

I’m definitely not the only one, two thirds of Gen Z now use ChatGPT to research brands, against 30% of boomers, so most people my age are doing some version of this now. We might not love AI, it might come for our jobs, but it is a brilliant data cruncher, and sorting 200 listings down to five relevant choices is exactly the kind of labour we’re happy to hand over.

I think this is what brands should be planning for, the buyer no longer sees 200 listings. They see three to five, and it’s happening in more sectors now: hotels, restaurants, skincare, insurance, flights, the lot.

Zero click discovery

The traditional playbook was about frictionless discovery. Rank well, buy the placement, sit at the top of Google or Rightmove, look good enough at the point of decision.

Agentic search takes that away. There’s no ad clutter to hide in and no packaging to be swayed by. The agent goes straight to structured data, reviews, third party mentions, and whether it can confidently work out what you are. Then it hands over a shortlist to your buyer.

Basically, it’s an ultra-strict gatekeeper, and the first casualty is the generic mid-brand, if there is no distinct identity for the model to latch onto and no reputation for it to verify, so you don’t make the shortlist.

Which creates a paradox for anyone who thought AI would flatten branding. You don’t need a strong brand despite agents. You need one because of them.

Doubled up validation

The brand now has to work hard at two separate moments, for two completely different audiences.

Firstly, for the bots you need enough of a digital and cultural footprint that the model can classify you as a top answer. Making sure it can access clean, structured data, and consistent entity recognition across the web, reviews, press, etc, is what gets you into the shortlist.

You also can’t fake your way there by writing on your own website. One study of 23,387 citations across five AI engines found that when someone asks about a brand by name, 48% of what the model cites is earned media, editorial, forums, review sites, directories, and only 23% is the brand’s own content. On review-type questions, it’s 82% earned. It’s not possible to optimise your way in, your brand has got to be talked about.

For the humans, you need enough emotional resonance that when the agent presents you, the person says yes. That’s driven by a strong, attractive brand.

I don’t know a single person who blindly accepts what their agent tells them. Everyone clicks the link and has a look. But if the human feels ambivalent, or doesn’t recognise you, or gets a weird feeling from the website, they override the recommendation and go back to searching manually.

Only 2% of people would buy from an AI-recommended brand without checking it first. 98% of consumers verify before buying after an AI recommendation. 45% say they immediately Google the brand.

Being recommended is not the same as being bought from, but it sure helps.

The human still has a veto

Lowkey, I think if an AI found me a flat that hit 100% of my numerical criteria, right price, right light, quiet street, but it was managed by a property brand I’d never heard of and the photos were blurry, dark, or grubby-looking, I would not book a viewing. I’d take that as a sign the search wasn’t quite fulfilled by the agent and carry on looking myself.

This says to me that, in this context, brand awareness has become a trust layer. It lets a human say yes to a suggestion they didn’t personally research.

This is a trend that will continue to grow, 62% of Gen Z and millennials say they prefer shopping with AI tools, compared with 51% of consumers overall. Although 75% say they'd lose trust in AI shopping entirely if they found out the results were sponsored. We don’t mind delegating to the agent right up until we suspect it's an advert.

AI is still bad at vibes.

When I was searching, I knew Claude could not tell me what a street felt like. It couldn’t tell me about neighbourhood energy, or whether I’d feel safe walking home at night, or that a place looks lovely in photos but sits next to a road that roars next to your head from 6am. That’s why I still validate, still read reviews, that’s why I still went for physical viewings. Models are exceptional at aggregating data against specific criteria. They are weak on texture, atmosphere and local knowledge.

If agents are doing the research, I think what actually builds reputation in 2026 is word of mouth, real-world presence, physical design, and driving culture, as they all help both gatekeepers trust you.

We’ll delegate choice, not taste

The last question, and the one I’ve been debating for a while, if we let AI shortlist our clothes, our homes, or hotels, are we quietly handing our identity over to the average preference of a language model?

I don’t think so, I don’t know anyone who’d use AI to shape their taste. They’d use it to find a dupe of a specific coat, or a cheaper version of a pair of shoes they’d already decided they wanted. They’re not asking it what the look should be in the first place.

Homes, or hotels, are different because they’re criteria-led. Two-bed, this budget, this postcode, near a good coffee shop. That becomes a filtering-led data issue, and models are excellent at filtering problems. Same with restaurants and hotels: I’ll happily take a shortlist, then pick the one that feels right.

So we’re very willing to delegate the labour of narrowing down our choice. We are not willing to delegate taste because the recommended brand only gets accepted if it already feels like something we’d have chosen ourselves.

The agent decides what you see. You still decide what you want.

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

In fairness, I’d already started noticing it before this, while watching friends’ baby shower gift lists, clocking the brands that kept coming up in conversation. I started to see a pattern in how parenthood is packaged, sold, and performed right now.

Peachies vs Pampers

There’s a brand called Peachies that’s been everywhere recently. They ran a brilliant campaign called “Blood, Sweat, Tears, Baby” about the actual realities of parenthood, that departs from the classic love-driven soft-focus version, and the way they’ve built their brand world is really different. The art direction, for example, is built entirely around this tension that new parenthood is not only about having children, but also about maintaining your pre-parenthood lifestyle whilst having them. Still being able to go out with your mates, still turning up to clubs or events, and not being about permanently running on empty, or walking round with baby sick down your top. Peachies' own website imagery is basically that as their shot list, a mum mid-sip of wine with the baby sitting in her jumper, another in a going-out ‘fit and full vibrant orange hair reaching for the delivery box, and one on the phone in a sharp blazer, with the baby just hanging out. The nappy is barely the point. What's actually being sold is continuity, the proof you didn't disappear into parenthood, you just added a very well-dressed baby to the life you already had.

In a YouGov survey of 1,050 UK mothers this year found 55% reported a loss of identity after becoming a mother, with 78% experiencing some form of role confusion post-birth. That’s the feeling Peachies is standing against, not necessarily just wetness or leaks, but the sense that “mother” or “parent” has erased the individual person underneath it.

Peachies raised £2.1m from Arma Vir Partners, became a certified B-Corp in November 2024, and picked up Startup of the Year at The Grocer Gold Awards 2025. There’s been real institutional validation for this five-year-old challenger brand, it’s being taken as seriously as the legacy players it’s up against.

By contrast, growing up my dad worked for Procter & Gamble, so we were a Pampers family. What I noticed is that Pampers caters to the baby’s needs: how long it’ll keep them dry, stopping the “poonami,” comfort, catering to developmental stages. Whereas Peachies decentres the child. They lead with their B-Corp status, talk about honest parenting, and are driven by the brand’s slick contemporary aesthetic. Even the website feels like a tech company’s, super clean, stats up front, a slick 3D render of the nappy itself. It’s a baby brand in a way that has nothing to do with babies.

I think that is the distinction. Pampers markets to the fact that you are a parent, with a baby. Peachies markets to the identity of the parent doing the buying. Rather than centring in on “you have a baby,” it centres on “who are you, and what does buying this say about you.” That’s where the strength of their brand identity actually comes from. I think it shows, to a degree, parenthood is becoming more aspirational, and baby and childcare brands having to step up accordingly.

Why now

So why now? A couple of things, cultural and economic, feeding into each other.

The UK fertility rate is at a record low, 1.39 births per woman, the lowest since 1977. So it could be easy to conclude that “everyone wants kids now.” For most of history, having children was the default next step after marriage, driven by heteronormative and often religious expectation.

However, I don’t think that is what is happening. Now, for the majority of parents, there’s a real cost calculation involved in choosing to have them at all. Full-time nursery in England now averages £12,000–14,000 a year, rising to £20,000–24,000 in London. And the parents who do go ahead are older than they’ve ever been: the average mother is now 31.1, the average father 34, both up from the mid-to-late twenties in 1975.

What’s also shrinking is family size and the pool of people having kids, so what’s rising is spend per child within a smaller, older, wealthier group. That’s showing up in the market data, too, the luxury kids’ products market is forecast to grow from $46.7bn this year to $80.7bn by 2036. People are unlikely to have more than two or three children, but they’re spending more visibly on the ones they do have. It’s become cool to have children in this climate, because it proves you have the means and the privilege to afford them.

What does the future of culturally savvy parenthood brand actually look like?

Peachies is still the best case study here. It’s a brand that speaks to the parent’s identity as much as the child’s needs. In the future, I can see baby brands leaning on fashion and cultural brand codes, drops, collabs, and aesthetic packaging rather than classic baby-aisle codes of softness and cuteness. It sells competence and taste as a parenting virtue, not just banking on love.

Unresolved thoughts

A few things I haven’t settled. Is this take on culturally savvy parenthood actually new, or is it just “yummy mummy,” or the old “have it all, be a girlboss and a great mum” idea, repackaged for a platform economy?

Eugene Healey, in the piece that started me down this road, argues that parenthood has “replaced eternal youth as our culture’s central (or at least, sole) desire.” I’m not sure that holds up. If it were really our central desire, you wouldn’t expect the fertility rate sitting at a record low of 1.39, births at their lowest since 1977. What’s aspirational isn’t quite as simple as having children, it’s the visible ability to afford having them. That’s a much narrower, much more exclusive performance than “central cultural desire” suggests, and it’s worth being precise about who it’s actually for.

Let me know what you think, is this just a repackaging of motherhood, or are new desires driving parental purchase patterns?

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

What actually struck me was that in the slow moments, half the wedding had sat down to play cards. Not just cards, either, a backgammon board appeared from someone’s hand luggage, and a majong set was produced. It was amazing, it was such an icebreaker. Strangers who’d never met sat down and just chatted. Same rules (mostly, some international variants), same shorthand, same instinct for when to talk trash. In a room full of people with little particularly obvious in common, a game did heavy lifting.

I’ve been chewing on why that happened, and it turns out I’m not the only one clocking it. There’s a tactile renaissance going on, and if you’re a brand not paying attention to it, you’re missing free real estate.

Logging off, showing up

Zoom out, and there are basically two cultural moods running in parallel right now: everyone wants to log off, and everyone wants to feel like they are part of a community. Sauna culture, padel clubs, and analogue tabletop games are all doing the same kind of thing, replacing the loud, screen-lit, over-photographed nightclubs with something lower pressure and fully present.

Padel is the clearest example. Courts are now clustering next to coffee shops and boutique gyms the way Pret used to cluster next to banks. Heineken 0.0 partnered with Premier Padel specifically to buy into their “social DNA“, they said: “For Heineken® 0.0, joining the world of padel is about more than the matches on the court, it’s about the community that surrounds it and staying connected with today’s evolving lifestyle needs.”

Recently, I wrote about how saunas and wellness spaces have the same kind of desirability, cashing in on the actual radical act of trading screen time for steam time.

The concept I am keen to discuss today are the games. New York is the clearest proof of concept. Green Tile Social Club has built a mahjong scene tight enough that people now turn up solo just to get a seat at the table, attendance reportedly doubled in a few months. Across town, 7 Spring is doing the same for backgammon, a members’ club built entirely around the board, not the bar. I won’t lie, the modern, stylish branding of both of these is a contributing factor to their growth, but that paired with the analogue cultural current they have become winners in the city's social scene.

Back home, H&M Home’s backgammon set with Palm Heights sold out within hours. Addison Ross launched a whole range. No longer niche, very much a coffee table requirement.

Why these games?

Part of it is just how tactile they are. Polished wood, the clack of ceramic tiles, the rattle of dice in a cup, it’s sensory in a way scrolling could never be. We have been craving touch, and this is the perfect solution to it.

Part of it is the social engineering. These games have fast rounds and a low barrier to entry, you don’t need The Queens Gambit levels of strategy to play a hand, which makes the games act as icebreakers. There is a slight status layer underneath, like if you already know how to play, if you’ve got the etiquette down, that’s a flex, but a subtle one. It’s not about how much you’ve spent, it’s about what you know. That’s the common thread we have been finding, luxury has stopped being about spend and started being about cultural fluency, if you know, you know.

So why these and not chess, for example? It had its own revival, thank you, Queen’s Gambit, but that one peaked back in 2020/21 and it’s fundamentally a solitary, cerebral thing, one v one, brain versus brain. This wave is different, it’s collective and social. It only works if there’s a room full of people.

Slightly ironically for a trend built on “logging off”, these games are extremely photogenic. Graphic tiles, colour-blocked boards, they’re built to perform online, which means every “look how offline I am” photo is also perfect for the feed.

I think it would be a disservice to ignore how 2026 does feel like something of a “Chinamaxxing” moment, the jokes about “you’ve met me at a very Chinese time in my life” aren’t coming from nowhere, and mahjong’s rise sits inside a bigger wave of Western interest in Chinese aesthetics, from Mandarin collars on the runway to the rise of guochao. I think, to be honest, that there’s real cultural tension with the rise of these games and it’s worth asking, who’s running these clubs, who’s profiting from $15,000 “heritage” sets, and whether this is cultural appreciation or something closer to appropriation?

What’s next

It’s not just the East Asian games getting the attention, Dishoom’s sister venue, Permit Room, has run carrom nights, pulling a game from the Indian diaspora and putting it on the table for anyone who fancies learning.

If carrom follows the same trajectory mahjong just did, a diaspora ritual, a third-space activation, aesthetic discovery, brand adoption, I’d call it the next one to watch. Dishoom’s already there. The rest of us are catching up.

Make it playable

There’s a change happening in what the experience of luxury even means. It used to be about the aesthetic and a label, now it’s more about craftsmanship, scarcity, and tactile materiality over logos. Games slot straight into that. If you know how to play, you’re in the club. The actual luxury is having the time to sit down and use it.

Which is the whole point for brands, really. Invitation beats advertisement. Get people into a room to play, a kiosk, a café, a Tuesday night carrom table, and you’re not interrupting their day with an advert, you’re giving them a reason to want to be part of your world. They came for the game. They’ll stay for the community and brand.

So maybe the real opportunity for brands is how they can use a table, a set, and an open seat.

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

Luxury travel never really sold the destination. It sold a promise: turn up, and it will be exactly as advertised. Sun on schedule, safety at the border, and no “influencers” snapping pics with you looking your worst in the background. For most of the last 80 years, that promise mostly held. Right now, the traditional routes are fractured in three different ways, which all layer up into one issue.

Initially, we can see the routes to destinations are moving due to war. Turkey isn’t even a combatant in this year’s Iran war, and it’s still lost around 80% of its Gulf visitors since the conflict began, and foreign demand is still roughly 30% below normal. The Gulf itself was forecast to grow 13% this year, but instead it's now projected to go down 11-27%.

Meanwhile, British Airways has suspended flights into eight Middle East cities, including Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha, with some routes cancelled into October, so “safest city in the world” is not a line Dubai will get to use for a while. Q1 passenger traffic is way down. March saw a 66% drop in passenger numbers, and hotel cancellations hit 60% within 48 hours of the initial strikes.

In the wake of that, Anguilla's visitor numbers are up 11% this year, and search interest in Sint Maarten has jumped 133% year-on-year, making it the fastest-growing international destination in the current booking data.

The other way war is reshaping how the wealthy travel is how Iran and Russia have blocked out airspace, so international air traffic is being squeezed through a narrower corridor between the Black and Caspian seas, or sent the long way round via Saudi Arabia, adding 2 to 5 hours onto more than 40 routes. In addition to longer flights, Jet fuel roughly doubled once the Strait of Hormuz closed. Going from roughly $85–90 a barrel to $150–200, and Qantas, SAS and Air New Zealand have all passed that cost straight onto the ticket price instead of absorbing it. Private jets don’t escape it either: insurers are charging up to $50,000 per flight in “war risk” premiums just to land in parts of the Middle East. So no, nobody’s gone off Dubai or Istanbul. Getting there got slower, pricier, and less insurable. Routes are shifting because of unreliability and cost. Interestingly, you can see it in how wider luxury goods’ balance sheets are affected by it, with LVMH’s fashion and leather goods division down 9% in a single quarter, which it blamed squarely on lack of tourist spend.

Another side to this is climate, luxury sells reliability and certainty, a beach holiday to the Caribbean was a guarantee of sun on schedule, a ski holiday to the Alps was a guarantee of snow. Luxury sold the promise of a location behaving exactly as expected. That guarantee is breaking down. Lapland hit near ‑40°C in January and stranded travellers. France, Spain and Italy all broke 40°C with red alerts through June, snarling transport and shutting attractions that don’t have the infrastructure for that kind of heat. 68% of luxury American travellers now say climate risk actively shapes where they book. Despite that, comprehensive travel insurance sales are at a seven-year low while the average summer trip has crept past $9,000. People are paying more for something less likely to deliver what it promised, and insuring themselves against disruption less than ever.

The third fracture is the buyer. An estimated $54 trillion is about to pass from husbands to wives, specifically, for the simple reason that women outlive men. Additionally, for the first time in history, women now spend roughly a third of their lives post-menopausal, a life stage that drives its own demand for treatment and management.

That money is landing on a market already built to receive it. “Longevity and wellness travel” has become a named, funded category worth around roughtly $11 billion this year, growing about 13% annually, with clinics like Biograph charging $7,500 - $15,000, which covers diagnostics, IV drips and blood panels.

Combine that with "hushpitality": privacy and an if-you-know-you-know status overtaking visible spending as the thing that actually signals wealth, and even a growing appetite for being offline, since logging off has quietly become its own kind of flex.

This all paints a picture of the buyer profile for the next decade of luxury travel: increasingly female, increasingly wealthy in her own right, shopping for longevity, wellness, and discretion.

Luxury travel’s implicit promise has always had two halves: it will go exactly as planned, and it will mark you out as someone who got something others can’t. War and climate attack the first half from two different angles. War breaks whether you can even get there at a stable price, and climate breaks whether it behaves as promised once you land, but they’re both hitting the same target: reliability. That’s a crisis luxury could theoretically route around. Bunker the hotel, charter the jet, buy better insurance. Difficult, but solvable.

The buyer shift entrenches the change rather than being just a rough patch, because it’s not a third disruption sitting alongside the other two. If the buyer still wanted what they’ve always wanted (a trophy destination, a place that says “I was there”), the industry could just spend its way back to reliability. Instead, the two reliability failures and the changing buyer are a pincer: reliability breaking at the exact moment the customer stops needing the thing reliability was in service of.

Which is why “invest domestically, stop opening pop-ups abroad” is the wrong solution. It’s a real estate answer to a brand question. It tells you where to put a shop. It says nothing about what the shop is meant to promise, or to whom. The real question is smaller and much harder: what can a luxury brand still guarantee when the weather won’t cooperate, the airspace won’t cooperate, and who is it actually promising that to, given the person buying is turning into a profile the industry has mostly ignored. There are astonishingly few luxury travel brands built explicitly for wealthy older women. The brands that honour the new consumer and the new drivers, will win the next few years.

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

So it was a small joy to pick up an Esquire on the way into the studio (print’s not dead) and find that exact still wheeled out in a grooming spread about sweating less over the summer. Someone in that art department had the same heatwave brain as me. What stopped me was where it sat. A few pages earlier, the same issue was flogging a Prada skipping rope for over a thousand pounds, and Man Ray inspired Saint Laurent dumbbells. This is luxury’s idea of sweat. Beautifully lit, very expensive, and artful, if faintly embarrassed about itself.

Every call to action across the anti-sweat pages was about not being caught out. Avoiding “the mid-commute back patch”, the post-gym redness, “the shiny forehead by 3pm”. The blotting papers, a snip at forty quid from Hermès, are there for “any occasion on which you would rather not look gently poached”. Beautiful line. However, you can see what it is doing. Nothing on these pages sells you a better version of yourself. It sells you the absence of an embarrassing one.

What I really noticed was the difference, as an avid reader of Grazia, the contrast was stark. Women’s beauty sells the upside. Glow, radiance, plump, firm, sculpt. Men’s grooming sells the downside removal. Don’t smell, don’t shine, don’t be the sweaty one in the meeting. Luxury men’s skincare is a subtraction category, and the language is where you can see it most clearly.

In the copy, every product in that spread is about something other than how you look. The AKT deodorant balm was “designed with long days under hot stage lights in mind.” That reframes your sweat as an occupational hazard rather than a personal issue. The Margaret Dabbs product is a foot hygiene cream, not a foot care cream, and it is all about heat and “training” taking their toll. You don’t smell because your feet smell. You smell because you train. Very manly. Not one of them is justified by saying this will make you look good. The most they will risk is this will stop you looking bad.

Prestige grooming has tiptoed around skincare for men for decades, terrified of sounding feminine. Shaving became the one ritual you could safely hang everything else off, the manly Trojan horse for a moisturiser. The early-2000s vocabulary was razor relief, oil control, cooling gel, pure utility. The 2020s version talks about energising, restoring, focus. Care for men finally got an emotive vocabulary, it is just that the feelings still have to route through ambition and performance, never anything as soft as wanting to look nice.

The avoidance is seen in the size of ranges as well as linguistically. Jared Holst observed that Clinique's "for men" range offers four areas, shave, cleanse, moisturise and a vague "targeted solutions". Switch to the side of the site that isn't labelled for men and you get twelve categories, eight skin concerns and five different formats. There are more concerns listed for women than there are whole categories for men.

It tells women they need far more products than they actually do and simultaneously gives men the option to limit how much time, effort, and money they have to spend on skincare.

Given all this, and assuming both men and women have equally nuanced skincare needs, it feels safe to assume many of the products marketed to women are unnecessary.

Perhaps women’s luxury skincare could learn from this, rather than leaning into women’s skincare products that use jargon, insecurity, and hyper-specification to make sure they are picked up off the shelf; they could look at language that emulates the men’s ranges. Maybe even a luxury range that only offers four types of product. We can only dream. However, I think a brand that did do this, translated this language to a woman-focused brand, there could be a real opportunity.

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

However, I didn’t expect something in the co-working area. Technically it’s there for calls, in practice, it’s the most active flirting scene I’ve encountered since pre-pandemic pubs. Just lots of strangers starting conversations, lots of “I’ll see you in the sauna” between Teams calls and reformer pilates.

Now, you could chalk it up to being in Yorkshire, or that these are just people who can all afford a £300/month gym membership, or maybe, we are seeing luxury wellness spaces become our third place.*

What’s a Third Place (and why technically these aren’t one)

Ray Oldenburg coined the term in 1989. The third space is an informal social setting separate from your home ("first place") and workplace ("second place"). cafes, libraries, parks, and community clubs, but they need to have a low barrier to entry, somewhere the full cross-section of a community could afford to just be.

David Lloyd is £300 a month. Othership starts at £135. A drop-in at Arc will run you £49. These are not democratic third places, they are more like “fourth places”, a place with community function but paywalled access.

I would argue, though, that they are serving a similar function to a nightclub. You arrive, share an ordeal or a space, decompress with people who aren’t your colleagues or your housemates, and come back next week. Take Arc, buried underground at Crossrail Place in Canary Wharf, 5,000 square feet of contrast therapy built by an ex-Soho House director and a neuroscientist. They take participants through breathwork in the colosseum lounge, 93 degrees at the top of a sauna big enough to have its own temperature gradient, three minutes in an ice bath kept close to freezing, then back through to the lounge to decompress with your fellow survivors. Something about the pseudo-ordeal nature of it creates an instant, weirdly intimate, shared bond, and allows conversation to flow in a way that Londoners normally avoid at all costs. (Read The Nudge’s hilarious breakdown of it)

Similarly, The Sanctuary, a 40-person sauna in Shoreditch, houses an alcohol-free bar, dj sets and a co-working space all inside a Victorian textile mill, or Othership, which runs singles socials and sound immersion nights and DJ takeovers. All of these luxury wellness locations are layering in typical nightlife traditions to the rituals they offer, which facilitates community building, and it’s working. Bathhouse, which opened in Brooklyn in 2019, expects to hit $120 million in run rate revenue by end of 2026, and just closed a $35 million raise to fund a national rollout.

Why now, why Gen Z?

Gen Z is on track to be the most sober generation on record. Not helped by the fact that from 2009-2022 Britain went from ~54,000 registered pubs to under 40,000. Over 14,000 gone. Not only due to Gen z, but year after year of hits, like the beer duty escalator (scrapped 2013 after years of above-inflation hikes), the 2017 business rates revaluation, COVID, or the 2022 energy crisis. The economics of running a hospitality venue simply got worse and worse. What we’re seeing isn’t a boring generation going sober and staying home, but a generation with an enormous appetite to socialise, and a lack of traditional spaces to do so, that’s relocated where it’s spending its money.

The stats are pretty unambiguous about where the spend has gone. 51% of Gen Z say they’ve formed new friendships through working out or wellness activities. 44% exercise specifically to socialise, and nearly three-quarters say they exercise or participate in wellness at least twice a week, up from 62% in 2024. Community is now the primary reason nearly half of Gen Z stick with fitness and wellness.

There is definitely a status aspect to this, a Remedy Place membership card, a cold plunge photo, carry the same signalling as a bottle service table or the right label did ten years ago. Except you can’t fake biological output. You either sleep well, or you don’t. The flex is the discipline, and discipline signals mastery and time, which are rarer than just money.

The gym and the nightclub have more in common than they look. A shared ritual, with strangers in proximity, and there’s a particular personal loosening that comes from physical exertion or shared vulnerability, you’re in a bathing suit, you’re uncomfortable, and the social armour is gone. The stripping back that happens in a cold plunge at 6°c is probably emotionally closer to a 3 am dance floor than it is to a spa day.

Additionally, there’s been a shift in how we track our bodies, and we can see how the wearable market has split into two distinct identities: quiet luxury and biohacking, but both benefit the wellness spaces. On one side, the Oura ring or Luma smart earrings, minimalist, tasteful, and discreet. On the other, Neuarable, Temple, or Muse S2, which show strain scores, EEG brain-activity sensing, earbuds tracking your VO2 max. All are counting steps, sleep scores, HRV, and many others. The self becomes a dashboard, and once the body is quantified, it becomes optimisable, and once it's optimisable, it becomes a project. This is arguably a pretty big shift in how this generation relates to their own bodies, analytically. You don't feel tired, you actually have a readiness score of 54 and a resting heart rate 12 beats above baseline. If you are hungover or don’t go to the gym for a week, it looks bad on your data. So, you skip the bar for the gym, because the tracker becomes the accountability mechanism that replaces social pressure to go out.

The format of the events are interesting too, most of the wellness events run 6pm to 9pm. You’re home before midnight, sleep is protected, tomorrow’s performance is intact. Same social function as a night out, calibrated for a generation that checks its recovery score in the morning.

Critically, I also think that this is a flight from their screens, a kind of digital fatigue. Cigna’s 2025 loneliness report found 67% of Gen Z feel lonely, despite being the most connected generation in history. Othership founder Harry Taylor put it plainly “There’s so much social media, which gives us the false perception that there’s social engagement and interaction. there’s a void in the wake of that social satiation that we all require as humans.” The move isn’t only away from alcohol and late nights, it’s also away from doomscrolling and toward something that actually registers in the body (and the trackers). The anti-doomscrolling-to-cold-plunge pipeline is very real.

The body as the last controllable thing

It would be easy to dismiss this as an obvious conclusion for a narcissistic generation obsessed with their image, but I also think that this is a ripple effect of an existential mindset.

In a moment of economic instability, collapsing institutional trust, war, ai-driven job anxiety, and a housing market that has effectively written off under-35s, the body is the final product left where your inputs reliably produce your outputs. You train consistently, you sleep better. You do the cold plunge regularly, your VO2 max improves. It’s easy to track on your Oura ring, and can see it working.

Equinox chairman Harvey Spevak said, “health is the new luxury.” While I agree, I think it runs deeper than aspiration, this is control-seeking behaviour. When you can’t touch the economy or the news cycle or your job security, you can control your body.

55% of Gen Z rank mental health as one of their top three reasons for exercising, up from 46% the year before. Not therapy, or mindfulness apps, but movement, presence, control of their body.

It is also worth mentioning that institutional faith, in healthcare, in government, in food systems, has regressed. The last time this happened at scale was the 1970s counterculture, which drove a generation toward holistic and body-led practices for the same reasons. The ancient practices at the centre of this revival (gua sha, oil pulling, ayurvedic principles, or the sweat lodge) have existed in other cultures for generations; people are now driving towards them as alternatives to the institutions that they now largely distrust.

So what?

What we’re seeing is a generation that’s relocated social infrastructure to the one place they can still exert control, their bodies. They’re quantifying it, optimising it, and using it to find a community.

The irony is that these spaces (Arc, Othership, Remedy Place, David Lloyd) are marketed as solitary pursuits. Performance. Optimisation. What’s actually happening in the sauna, the cold plunge, the reformer class, is the opposite. It’s connection, it’s belonging.

This is where brands need to shift, putting belonging as part of the brand is a real opportunity. Community architecture should be treated as an essential. Glo30 CEO Arleen Lambda put it best "We get to be witness to someone's life, their highs, their lows, their middles, and we are the constant. No matter what kind of day you had out there, this space belongs to you. People will know you, see you, appreciate you and be glad you're there." That quote is exactly why the spend in these spaces has increased, and why it will continue to grow. Everyone wants to feel like they are known, and they belong to an “in” group. The brands that build for that deliberately will have genuine growth opportunities.

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Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

Step one: how to find out why your brand isn’t standing out

This is actually my favourite bit of FMCG projects: going into shops, standing in front of the shelves, naturally feeling where people’s eyes go. You’ve got about three seconds to win someone over at shelf. That’s it. Three seconds.

So where do our eyes go first?

Straight to own label options.

Bleiker’s was completely lost on shelf. The overlapping shelves meant that anything not on the front row was lost in shadow. Putting dark packs at a disadvantage. The eye gets drawn to bright colour, pattern and simplicity, but also to any colour that’s different to the dominant fish category blue.

We also noticed that every “premium” cue Bleiker’s was using, like moody dark colours, serif fonts, wild landscapes, was also what every other brand was doing. We saw that the pack design could easily flip out to an own-brand label, and still feel completely at home. That was an issue.

Bleiker’s, which was arguably a better product, with more heritage, was losing to products with a fraction of its quality, because consumers literally could not tell the difference in the time they had.

Step two: Find where your culture has gone

Dig a bit deeper and there was a second problem: taste and culture had shifted.

We interviewed a range of younger people, with different backgrounds and eating habits and asked them what comes to mind when they think “smoked salmon.” The answers were strikingly consistent. “Posh white people with avocado on toast,” “Christmas, champagne, special occasion,” “affluent middle-aged professionals and 70-year-old ladies serving it as a canapé to their husband’s golfing friends.” Even people who loved eating it pictured someone else entirely when they thought about who it was for. “I think of wealthy retired women and a generic Scandinavian, I don’t picture myself, which is weird because I love eating smoked salmon.”

Not ideal.

So we found a gap. The gap was between perception and where smoked salmon was actually living in culture. Smoked salmon as a food had moved on. Despite perception, it was no longer reserved for canapés or occasions. It was turning up on bagels, in scrambled eggs, in everyday brunches and elevated midweek dinners. Bleiker’s labels were still communicating like it was still 1998 and you only eat this stuff with a side of silver service, so they were stuck selling to a customer who was ageing out, while the actual consumer gap was happening in the world of sexier, brighter, younger “treat-yourself” demographics.

Instead of trying to chase that niche older ultra-premium demographic, we zoomed out to a mindset. We called them Experience Elevators: people who take a normal moment (breakfast, a get-together, a random Tuesday) and make it slightly more special. Could be 24, could be 64, they just wanted to make something a little bit nicer.

We wanted to invite this younger generation in with something insta-worthy. To do that we knew they needed to:

• Lead with taste, make people’s mouths water before anything else

• Keep the healthy choice as a nice bonus

• Inspire actual usage, recipes, combos, ideas, not just “serve on a blini”

Step three: Find the Soul

We ran our Brand Spark process to nail down the soul of the brand.

The Home of Smokecraft

This new soul emphasised the process and transformation that happens to the fish in the smokehouse itself, a radically different approach to the typical seascape and provenance-orientated cues in the category.

Soul: Bleiker’s creative ‘smoke-craft’ approach to smoked salmon opens up a world of complex, exciting and thrilling sensations

Purpose: The mighty salmon, a superfood superstar. Long overlooked, we’re putting it back in the limelight by showing the world how amazing it can truly be when it’s hand-cured, hand-smoked; made at its best.

Vision: Hog roast is over it, beef’s had its day, chicken’s basically done. Smoked salmon is the new main character of the feast.

Personality: Quirky, generous, a craftsman, and bold food lover

Values: Salmon, our superfood hero, created with family and community, and handcrafted without compromise. All moments can be divine with smoked salmon. Smoking is an art, not a science. We care for our people, it’s those that make it all possible.

We also did a Fuck-It List (one of my favourite exercises) to find everything that Bleiker’s stood against. Their fuck it’s were: salmon as an afterthought food, losing the family values that built the business, pretending to be experts, cutting corners on quality, bad culture, generally taking itself too seriously.

All of this work led to the visuals of the rebrand, leading the brand away from the moody, landscape-led, silver-foiled clichés of the category and towards something that actually stood out on shelf and felt true to their identity. The smokehouse itself became the central design device, a bold, smokehouse-shaped architecture on pack, bellowing out the flavour inside. By using the fish as cutouts, we broke up the square format every other brand in the category was using. We kept the handcrafted style of the logo but added a bit of panache.

Across the wider range- flakes, mackerel, and a growing list of new flavours- the smokehouse architecture flexed to fit different formats, giving Bleiker's a flexible, future-proof set of assets it could keep building on as the range grew.

Did it work?

They had a 30% growth in like-for-like sales on existing lines post-launch. Listings went from 60 regional stores to 260+ nationwide, including a big rollout with Morrisons, plus new multi-SKU listings across other major retailers. ROI was reached within 4 months, and new seasonal listing opportunities were won across major supermarkets for innovation SKUs. Bleiker’s has become a recognisable brand in the category.

If your product looks like everything else in the category, even if yours is objectively better, you’re invisible. Full stop. Doesn’t matter how good it is if nobody can clock it in three seconds.

“More premium” wasn’t the answer. Premium had become the most crowded, most identical space in the entire category, everyone shouting the same thing, louder. The answer was both looking at the culture and that space that had shifted, and what no one else was doing.

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

We all know the bottle. It has lived in the back of every middle-class kitchen cupboard since approximately 1988.

So what changed for Graza?

Graza launched in 2022, out of Brooklyn, the founder had travelled through Cadiz in Spain, tasted these incredible single-origin oils, and wanted to bring something back. He had a chef friend who told him, essentially, that the world did not need another small-batch artisan olive oil, there were already plenty of beautiful oils going unnoticed behind beautiful bottles in beautiful delis. What it needed was a format people would actually use.

So they put it in a squeeze bottle. ( As inspired by commercial kitchens, chef-style olive oil squeeze bottles are kitchen essentials that allow for precision drizzling, controlled portioning, and ultimately mess-free cooking, who doesn’t want that?)

Three SKUs: Drizzle, for finishing. Sizzle, for cooking. Frizzle for high heat cooking. The bottles are still the dark green ( light can oxidise the olive oil and make it go rancid), but are paired with joyful hand-drawn illustrations and a comic serif typeface, to create the kind of product that looks like it was designed by someone who has opinions about record sleeves and also makes very good pasta. It is, immediately and obviously, the olive oil of someone who cooks. Crucially, it was made to sit on your counter, you wouldn’t hide in a cupboard. It wants to be seen.

This is the shelfie era of food products. In the same way that Aesop became a status symbol on bathroom counters and Le Labo made people leave their fragrance out on purpose, Graza made olive oil into a counter object. An item that communicates your cultural taste before you’ve cooked a single thing. It travels well too, as at home in Brooklyn as it is in Soho. It looks great on screen too, this is a product that is made to be photographed.

By late 2025, Graza represented 24% of total olive oil category growth in the US.

The squeeze bottle format is firmly in the UK, with a few lookalike brands popping up too.

Good Phats picked it up. Metabolic health positioning, polyphenol content front and centre. Doing the same thing Graza did but in the functional health corner of the category.

Glug is in there too. Squeezy bottle, hand-drawn characters, playful naive illustration style, a sort of sun-bleached, slightly goofy version of the same visual language.

M&S also launched squeezy bottles this year. One for olive oil, one for avocado oil. Which is both a kind of compliment to Graza and sign that the format is no longer a differentiator.

Here’s the thing about a brand signal that can be copied, eventually, the mainstream notices, and the moment M&S does it, this can’t be your key differentiator any longer, otherwise, consumers are just buying a format of olive oil.

However, in the case of Graza, and why it still works, the squeeze bottle was never really about packaging. It came out of a conversation with a chef about how people use olive oil in real kitchens. That one insight, design for the behaviour, not the category convention, did the positioning. By making it look like how it was going to be used, it defined who this product was for, how they cooked, what their kitchen looked like, what they cared about.

The other smart part of their brand strategy is they split the range by use-case: Sizzle for cooking, Drizzle for finishing, and now Frizzle for high heat. Three different use moments. Three specifically different jobs, named accordingly. Historically, not so clearly stated.

Which makes what M&S have done rather revealing. Their avocado oil says squeeze and drizzle. Their olive oil says squeeze and sizzle. They’ve borrowed the bottle, and they’ve borrowed the verbs. The behavioural language Graza invented to describe two distinct moments in cooking has been absorbed into a supermarket own-brand descriptor. Which is either the sincerest form of flattery, or a sign that a brand idea has been thoroughly digested by the mainstream.

The brands that follow don’t necessarily have that insight, if all they can copy is the bottle, thats ok. A bottle without the idea behind it is just a bottle.

When M&S does it, it’s confirmation the format has moved from cultural shorthand to category default. Which means maybe in a few years the next interesting thing in olive oil probably involves a very beautiful, very serious glass bottle that looks like nothing else on the shelf. For the moment though, it certainly stands out on shelf.

The question for anyone brand building right now: what’s your squeeze bottle? What packaging decision are you making that feels functional but is actually doing far more of your positioning work? Are you making it consciously, or are you just copying the bottle?

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

There’s a lot of content being put out at all times. We see frameworks, recycled LinkedIn advice, and people announcing they’re “excited to share” something. They all call themselves “thought leaders”. In truth, they get very little engagement, and worse still, their content is dull.

As a corporate company, you’re consistently told that your leaders need to be “thought leaders”, so in an effort to fill the void, thought leadership became a content marketing tactic.

It’s funny that the word “leadership” is used because it’s usually just best practices presented as an innovative approach, or hot takes designed to be as inoffensive as possible, basically the business equivalent of horoscopes. Vague enough to feel relevant to everyone, but you definitely can’t come after them with specifics.

As of May 2026, LinkedIn has had enough. The platform announced it's now actively suppressing posts and comments it flags as low-effort AI-generated content, what they're calling "AI slop." Posts won't be removed, but they'll be pushed out of recommendations and away from anyone outside your immediate network. They say their detection system correctly identifies generic AI-generated content 94% of the time. Ironically, they're using AI to clean up the mess that AI created. The message, even if politely worded, is “stop letting AI do all the thinking for you”.

This is for the best, we know that bad thought leadership might be actively harming your brand.

Nearly three-quarters of decision-makers say an organisation's thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities than its marketing materials. So if it's poor, it reflects badly on everything else you put out. Currently, less than half of decision makers say the overall quality of the thought leadership they read is good, and only 15% describe it as very good or excellent.

Once a brand is perceived as producing marketing disguised as thought leadership, trust recovery takes a long time and could need a complete voice or strategy realignment. You can accidentally slowly contaminate your entire brand with bad or lazy content.

There’s also a group of people influencing your deals that you probably aren’t thinking about. LinkedIn calls them “hidden buyers”, the finance, legal, compliance, and procurement stakeholders who sit inside buying groups and have just as much sway over a final purchase decision as the person you’re pitching to. More than 40% of B2B deals stall because of internal misalignment, and hidden buyers are a major reason why. They’re reading your content, 64% spend over an hour a week on thought leadership, however, many of them report little or no interaction with sales. Hidden buyers want content that challenges their assumptions rather than validates what they already think. Safe, hedged, inoffensive-but-dull content doesn’t reach them, you just add to the noise they’ve already learned to filter out.

Additionally, when everyone publishes the same safe takes, you become interchangeable in buyers’ minds. Your content becomes extra fluff and noise rather than a differentiator. Price becomes the deciding factor because there’s no intellectual differentiation, so it becomes a race to the bottom.

Anxious to publish, Anxious to not

B2B clients feel pressure from above to maintain thought leadership to stay relevant. Competitors are publishing whitepapers. The CEO should have a POV, but what should it be? There’s fear of saying nothing versus fear of saying something wrong.

What if the risk of being wrong is outweighed by never having an opinion?

60% of decision-makers say good thought leadership makes them willing to pay a premium to work with that organisation. The risk is actually in being bland.
Now LinkedIn's algorithm has formalised that risk. Content creation on the platform is up 14% year on year. The volume of noise is growing. If you're not saying something real, based in truth, or on your own knowledge or research, you're not saying anything, and soon you'll be algorithmically invisible too.

Every piece of forgettable thought leadership is building the wrong brand associations. You end up anchoring the impression that you, or your company, is risk-averse, derivative, self-serving and, worst of all, boring.

What does good look like?

If you want to understand what good actually looks like, start with the people who are doing it best.

Mark Ritson is (frustratingly) worth reading, partly because he doesn’t care if you disagree with him. His Marketing Week column reads kind of like someone who has run out of patience with the industry and decided the most helpful thing he could do was speak straight. He backs everything with evidence, and he’ll call out a brand for doing something stupid even if everyone else is applauding it.

Sophie Miller, who founded Pretty Little Marketer, is worth following, she writes about social media, community, and how to build a following. Her thought leadership is brimming with personality, and she's also a live demonstration of everything this article argues for. Over 600,000 people follow her because she's specific, because she shares the behind-the-scenes, and because she shares her proof points. On a platform increasingly full of people talking about authenticity without being particularly authentic, she's one of the few.

Ana Andjelic writes The Sociology of Business on Substack and approaches brand from a cultural theory angle rather than exclusively a marketing one. She writes about status, taste, aspiration, and what happens when brands try to manufacture things that can only be earned. If you work with challenger brands or anything in the premium space, she’s probably the most useful person on this list. Her thought leadership is clean, concise and well visualised.

Then there’s Matt Kilb, KISS co-founder, who writes a weekly newsletter on LinkedIn doing exactly what this article argues for. Real observations from real client work. Specific. Opinionated. The practitioner’s view, from someone who is inside the work every week rather than commenting from a distance. Worth a follow, and I might be slightly biased, but honestly, the bias is warranted.

None of these examples are posting “be kind to your employees” or AI slop. Just writing, that sounds like them, based on their real expertise.

So, How to Do Thought Leadership well?

This is the checklist I use to write interesting thought leadership

1. Could this apply to literally any company? (Is it something really bland like “be kind to your employees”?)

2. Does it make anyone uncomfortable?

3. Would you implement these recommendations yourself?

If the answer is yes/no/no, try again.

You could also ask

• Might this piss off at least 30% of your audience?

• Is it a bit weird to say this in your industry?

• Would your competitors disagree with this?

Where do I Start?

Start with what you’ve genuinely noticed, it’s where we usually start at KISS, is internal conversation. Stuff we’ve noticed and discussed. Stuff that gets us excited and we think will excite others in the industry.

Don’t ask “what’s our position on AI in marketing?” That’s how you get lukewarm takes. Instead, say “We’ve noticed clients who use AI for ideation, but not execution, get 3x better results. Here’s why AI-only campaigns are failing.” Far more interesting. Much more specific.

Secondly, just prove you’ve done the work. Show the behind-the-scenes. A generic thought leadership post would say “Brands should focus on customer experience.” Great. Cool. What’s new?

Showing the behind-the-scenes, you might say, “We analysed 247 customer service transcripts from our clients. 89% of escalations weren’t product problems, but were unclear pricing communication. Here’s the email template that reduced escalations by 64%.” Brilliant. Far more interesting and much more useful.

Finally, differentiate at the belief level. If you’re a consultancy, what consultancy orthodoxy do you reject? Maybe “Most consultancies optimise for billable hours, which slows client progress because it creates a perverse incentive. We charge fixed project fees because we want you to succeed fast.”

It’s a way to show how your belief system sets your brand apart from the category.

Long Live Thinking!

Your competitors are publishing thought leadership to look credible. They’re actually eroding trust with every bland take, and now LinkedIn is making that erosion algorithmically invisible.

There are people inside your prospective clients’ organisations, in legal, finance, or operations, who are invisibly reading your posts, forming opinions, and will never take your call. Your thought leadership might be the only conversation you get to have with them.

Stats drawn from the 2024 and 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Reports, and LinkedIn's May 2026 editorial announcement, Keeping Conversations Real on LinkedIn by Laura Lorenzetti.

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

It was framed as a news kiosk. “The Original Oatly. Breaking News.” They had thought of all the touchpoints. A deliberately grumpy news stand man. Flowers wrapped in Oatly newspaper print, sold by feYi from stainless steel buckets. A sushi conveyor belt running drinks, Papaya & Basil Seed Smoothies, Teas & Black Sugar, Origin Burnt Lemon Cold Brew Tonics, Matcha Jell-Oat Shots on branded silver plates. And alongside all of that, Look Book Vol.3, a proper editorial newspaper shot fantastically by Dead Hungry, displayed on shelves under a fantastically curated vinyl selection. Slint. Mazzy Star. System of a Down. Floating Points and the LSO. The world-building was brilliant. However, this feels like a grown-up version of the oatly I remember. More culturally savvy, more fun.

I saw the post from Rob Godfrey, Head of Brand UK&I, who confirmed the whole thing was built in-house by Oatly’s Department of Mind Control. I cheekily asked if they’d post us a of their new lookbook, and they sent two, and six 1.5-litre bottles, and two cases of their new RTD Barista Iced Macchiato and Iced Flat White. Incredibly kind, very delicious.

But here’s what I actually can’t stop thinking about. This isn’t the Oatly of 2015. It isn’t the clap-back tweets, or the intentionally cringe Super Bowl ad where CEO Toni Petersson sits alone in a field singing off-key to a keyboard (although that is still one of my all-time favourite ads). This is more confident. More culturally fluent. Still completely, unmistakably Oatly, but just evolved into a mainstream brand.

So how? How does a challenger brand grow up without losing, or becoming, the thing they challenged in the first place?

Real challenger brands don’t really sell products. They sell opposition. The enemy is the centre of the brand, it creates the tension, the voice, the sense of community around a shared point of view. Without a villain, there’s no story, and without a story, there’s no soul. This is the mechanic of a challenger brand ethos. So how do you pick the right enemy? Well, there are two kinds.

The category enemy is the first one. Big dairy. Faceless corporate conglomerates. Beige lager. It works brilliantly at launch, consumers get it immediately, and it’s a simple rallying cry. The problem is that category enemies have a shelf life. You win, you get bought, or your enemy disappears. When any of those things happen, so does the core brand.

Wild was founded in 2019 with one very clear enemy: the single-use plastic deodorant industry. Refillable cases, plant-based formulas, zero waste, the brand built a loyal following of exactly the kind of consumer who would check a company’s supply chain before buying. In April 2025, Unilever acquired them for £230m. The same Unilever that owns Sure, Lynx, and Dove, the mass-market, conventional deodorant brands that Wild was created in direct opposition to. Independent co-shops dropped the brand within days. Eco-conscious customers announced they were switching. Wild’s own community had spent years buying into an identity that was, at its core, about being an independent. The enemy had literally become the parent company.

There’s also Ben and Jerry’s who built their entire brand on the idea of ice cream with a conscience. Unilever acquired them in 2000 with promises of independence. In September 2025, co-founder Jerry Greenfield quit after 47 years. “Standing up for the values of justice, equity, and our shared humanity has never been more important,” he said, “and yet Ben and Jerry’s has been silenced, sidelined.” The enemy had broken down the brand from the inside.

Both had category enemies. Both found category enemies have a shelf life.

So the other type of enemy is systemic enemies. Oatly’s enemy could have just been dairy brands, but it really has become the industrial food system.

Oatly was founded in 1994 off the back of research at Lund University and spent the next nearly two decades going more or less nowhere. Then in 2012, Toni Petersson arrived as CEO. He brought in John Schoolcraft as creative director, abolished the marketing department, and replaced it with something they called the Department of Mind Control. They redesigned the packaging “to feel like it was made in a basement” He put his personal email on the carton and promised to write a poem for any customer who didn’t like the product.

They claimed, “It’s like milk, but made for humans.” The Swedish dairy lobby, an industry body with 200 times Oatly’s revenue at the time, filed a 174-page lawsuit in 2015. So, Oatly published it in full. Their enemy handed them their best PR for free.

They printed their carbon footprint on the front of every pack and publicly challenged every other brand to do the same. They ran a campaign called “Food Industry, Show Us Your Numbers.”In June 2024, they became the first food and beverage company recognised as a “Climate Solutions Company.”

However, when Oatly took £200m from a Blackstone-led investment group in 2020 (Blackstone being linked to Amazon deforestation, its CEO having donated $3m to a pro-Trump super PAC) former fans called for boycotts. Oatly built a website. FckOatly.com catalogued every controversy the brand had ever faced, the Blackstone deal, the Glebe Farm lawsuit, the TikTok furore over their ingredients list, all of it in one place. "It's super convenient to have the latest boycotts and criticisms all in one place," they wrote. "We're not the type of company to hide from moments like these. We see all the negative headlines, posts and petitions as an inevitable consequence of trying to create positive societal change." The site got 300,000 visits in seven months.

Back to the news stand. Look Book Vol.3 under Slint’s Spiderland.

Oatly’s revenues hit $862m in 2025, up from $824m the year before, and they delivered their first-ever full year of profitability as a public company. The stock is still down 94% from its IPO peak, the operational years were rough, a supply chain disaster that cost them badly, but the brand never changed on its main mission.

New CEO Jean-Christophe Flatin, who came in from Mars in 2023, calls the current period a “recalibration.” The Department of Mind Control still runs all creative in-house. The social strategy still has two rules: be consistently inconsistent, and never bore people.

What I noticed in those photos from the London Coffee Festival is that this feels like a brand stepping into a second era of cultural confidence. There’s a real difference between irony as self-deprecation, the basement packaging, the cringe Super Bowl bad singing advert, and irony as authority. The news stand, the editorial lookbook, and the curated vinyl are no longer scrappy and fighting, this is an elevated, thoughtful, and artistic version of the brand.

The Wilds and Brewdogs of the world scaled the business and lost the brand. Oatly levelled up the touchpoints and has come back to protect the soul. The reason, I think, is simple: when your enemy is systemic, the brand is the mission. You cannot accidentally grow out of it.

The longevity of a challenger brand comes down, almost entirely, to which enemy you pick on day one. Category enemies have a ceiling. Systemic enemies scale with you. So, the question every founder should ask is, if we win, through scale, through becoming mainstream, does our enemy still exist? Is there still a reason to choose us?

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

This is not a unique experience. I’ve seen videos of women wearing them on the Tube, or in their cars on their lunch breaks, scaring their boyfriends in the evenings. There’s a whole trend of it on TikTok.

@alise_canderYes even on the plane. My fave 6 mins of the whole flight 😏💁🏻‍♀️ #sharkcryoglow #sharkbeauty #cryoglow #redlightmask @Shark Beauty UK

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A decade ago, being seen trying would have been mortifying. The early 2000s ran entirely on the premise that beautiful women were just born that way, skinny, hairless, clear-skinned, effortless. Admitting to liposuction or a 12-step routine was social death. Any effort to be hot, was kept secret. Now we watch them transform on our screens, their effort is our content.

Something fundamental has changed in what beauty is for, but also our attitude to it. We are high-maintenance in order to appear low-maintenance, and we are no longer pretending otherwise, because we are all filming it for content.

How we got here

It started with YouTube. In the late 2000s, Get Ready With Me routines turned a private ritual into daily vlogs, for the first time, you were watching someone do their actual skincare in real time, chatty, unedited, and everything on their shelf visible. Packaging shifted to keep up, designed for visibility on camera as much as for performance on skin.

Then TikTok arrived and turned the dial up entirely. Now it’s come-with-me-to-get-a-salmon-sperm-facial. The consultation, the recovery bruising, the hospital gown, everything is content. This is, I think, a direct reaction to the opacity of the mid-2000s influencer era, the just-drink-this-flat-tummy-tea-and-you-can-look-like-me years. There’s an appetite now for tangible, visible effort. Proof of work. We are all optimising our beauty in public, and optimisation, it turns out, doesn't stop at the surface.

Your bathroom says more about you than your wardrobe does

In Highsnobiety’s Status Economy Beauty report, they said that 73% of Cultural Pioneers would agree that their bathroom cabinet tells a story about who they are.

I think this shows that our bathroom shelves have become a statement of our values.

Think about what’s actually on those shelves now. Niacinamide next to magnesium next to Trip gummies next to a Whoop band charging on the counter. A water flosser. A jade roller you use maybe twice a week. None of these things are makeup, but they are all beauty now. The silo between health and beauty has collapsed.

Jessica DeFino, beauty reporter and critic, puts it well “Beauty has taken over a space that was previously occupied by an ‘it bag’ or logo mania.” The bathroom shelf is doing exactly what the designer handbag used to do, it’s broadcasting your cultural class.

63% of people also say they’ve bonded with someone over a beauty product or reference, almost like a secret handshake. Your knowledge of which retinol is worth it, which brand sold out before anyone heard of it, which supplement stack is best backed by science, are all subcultural shorthand. Your beauty stack is how you prove you speak the language.

Beauty stopped being about the final result

Or rather, the result still matters enormously, but it’s no longer the only motivator.

Beauty used to be about expressing this is who I am. Beauty now says, this is who I’m becoming. The language has shifted with it. Looksmaxxing. Morning shed. Tweakments. All of it is rooted in small, continuous transformation, and not a fixed expression of identity.

And that logic has now crept inside the products themselves.

Maybelline’s Super Stay Skin Tint has “with Vitamin C” in the product name. bareMinerals sells a Strength & Length Serum-Infused Mascara, clinically tested over eight weeks, with peptides designed to grow your lashes while you wear it. Lashology, a UK brand, is literally a lash growth serum housed inside a mascara. L’Oréal Paris sells a Telescopic Lift Mascara alongside a companion Lash Serum Solution as a two-product daily system.

The silo between makeup and skincare has dissolved. The product that used to be purely cosmetic, cover it up, look good right now, is now being asked to treat while it performs. Foundation that brightens over time. Mascara that grows your lashes over eight weeks. It’s the same shift as functional drinks, it should taste good and do good. It should look good, and do good.

Which brings us back to the mask.

Jessica DeFino says “The red light mask encompasses all of what beauty means today: it’s tech, anti-ageing, a display of wealth... it’s about the products you wear to show you’re putting in the work.”

That’s why it gets worn in public. It’s a declaration. “I am culturally savvy enough that I can afford to be this committed to self-improvement, visibly, on a Tuesday morning flight to JFK.”

Beauty brands are now competing with your gym membership

The beauty shelf doesn’t stop at your face. Beauty is now a whole-body project. Skin, hair, nails, gut, sleep, mood, muscle. Every cell, optimised

Skincare bleeds into supplementation. Fragrance into mood regulation. The Ordinary sits next to AG1 sits next to your Oura ring. Beauty now includes what you whisk into your smoothie, what you laser into your deep tissue, what you inject, stack, and track. Creatine, GLP-1s, salmon sperm facials, and peptides. The whole body can be improved.

Lizi Aston, Global Communications at DECIEM, said “We’re seeing the traditional boundary between beauty and wellness disappearing. Consumers now see beauty as part of a broader wellness routine that includes nutrition, sleep, mental health, and fitness, and products are evolving accordingly.”

A McKinsey report said that 79% of UK consumers say wellness is a top priority. Gen Z and millennials buy more wellness product types per year than any older generation.

The result is that beauty brands are no longer only competing with other beauty brands. They’re competing with protein powder subscriptions, doctors’ offices, gym memberships, tracking apps, and tech companies. The beauty coin is split across a much wider spend, so you’d better be cutting through.

The proof is right there inside L’Oréal’s own results. La Roche-Posay, science-backed, system-first, a brand built entirely around process and proof, outperformed Maybelline in early 2025. L’Oréal itself described the makeup market as “weak, notably in the US,” and launched an emergency innovation plan to try to stimulate it. Same parent company, same budget, same distribution, different cultural currency.

The consumer wants to be in on the process. They want to see the science, they want a routine they can perform, and a shelf that’s worth showing. They want the cultural capital that an intelligent beauty routine can afford them. The brands winning right now are the ones with clarity. The Ordinary. Momentous. Oura. You know what they’re for, why they work, and how they slot into a daily system.

Beauty brands are losing market share to a creatine subscription, or a Whoop band, or a Pilates studio that does its own merch. The category has expanded.

That’s the new brand currency, being able to show you are optimising in public. Selling a ritual someone can perform in front of a camera, which shows that they are in the know.

Highsnobiety puts it directly, “maybe your next product isn’t a product at all, but a routine people want to follow.” Maybe think less about campaigns, and more about how your brand lives in someone’s daily system.

I’d go further. Maybe the brands that survive the next decade of beauty won’t only be selling products, they’ll be selling membership to a system. Or even a full-stack, holistic approach, vitamins sold with your personalised skincare. They will be selling a legible daily act of self-improvement with enough cultural fluency to earn a place on the shelf, and enough visual interest to earn a place in their content.

Ask yourself honestly. If someone filmed their morning routine tomorrow and your product appeared on the shelf, would it say something interesting about them? Would it signal that they are culturally savvy? Would it hold its own next to the AG1 and the Oura ring and the magnesium?

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

We are in a moment of global heritage resurgence. The renewed interest in craft, in story, in human-made things with a traceable origin (accelerated in part by the cultural backlash against AI’s frictionlessly generic bleh) has made provenance more valuable. A Mintel report found that 48% of UK consumers actively purchase local food when possible, and 45% want to see more local options in supermarkets. Consumers are paying attention to where things come from. They want the story. They want the supply chain to be real.

Which makes it a weird time to claim you are British without explaining yourself.

Why does geography earn trust?

Provenance is a shortcut. That’s not a criticism of it, shortcuts are how brains work, and a label that communicates in three to five seconds is doing its job. When geography appears on a product, it’s doing several things simultaneously. It’s signalling quality (this place is known for this thing), traceability (someone specific made this somewhere specific), and story (there’s a reason this exists).

The problem is that not all geographic claims are equal. “Cornish” has legal teeth. It’s a designation with meaning enforced by protection, the same principle that says only sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France can be called Champagne. Cornish clotted cream, or Melton Mowbray pork pies, are products where the place is legally inseparable from the product. The geography is part of its definition.

“British” has no such protection. It means “made somewhere within these borders”, which in a country this size, with this much regional variation, is a spectacularly vague claim. You could make something extraordinary in rural Northumberland and something mediocre in a warehouse outside Swindon, slap Great British on both, and still be technically correct about each.

What happened to “British”

The “British” identity problem predates Brexit for sure, we have been making jokes about it for centuries. However, Brexit helped it grow it some nasty political teeth.

The problem is our fractured national identity. When you say France, you picture food, wine, and elegance. Germany, precision, and reliability. Italy, design, and warmth. When you say Britain, what do you actually see? A stiff upper lip. Perhaps extraordinary sarcasm, a population that apologises when someone else bumps into them. Contradictory values that say nothing of quality. Perhaps if you viewed us internationally, you’d think of the royals and poshness, however, as a Brit, that’s not what we see.

In 2016 there was this post-referendum spike in forced Britishness, Union Jacks on everything, the Vauxhall ‘Great British van drivers‘ campaign invoking Churchill and Kipling. This revealed the danger of reaching for national identity in a country that had just split almost exactly in half over what that identity meant. The Union Jack acquired renewed odious associations. Brands walked it back quietly. Steven Frampton, co-founder of game meat brand Wild & Game, put it plainly in The Grocer back in 2021, “There has been a definite feeling that the union flag is becoming associated with right-wing nationalist elements in the UK.” His brand had been using it as a “major selling point” on packaging. They moved it to a more subdued background role. The flag had become a damaged brand. For a significant portion of consumers, it started reading as something narrower than pride. Something that tightened the jaw rather than opened the wallet.

Why is hyper-local is working?

Yorkshire. Cornish. Devon. These work because they’re specific places, with deep and rich histories, consumers have those associations pre-loaded, built up over years of actual products, actual craft traditions, actual landscape. You don’t need to explain what Cornish seafood tastes like, or what a Yorkshire accent sounds like. The place does the explaining. The Yorkshire Mark is a fully trademarked regional provenance system, and the fact that Yorkshire has that infrastructure tells you where the confidence lies.

A Grocer survey from March 2026 found that 72% of people want to see supermarkets stocking more English, Welsh and Scottish produce. Note what they said: English, Welsh and Scottish. Not British.

There’s also something hyper-local does that’s easy to underestimate. It offers pride without politics. Say you’re proud to be Cornish and nobody pictures a statement on immigration. Say you’re proud to be British in 2026, and you’re making a statement people will interpret through their own political lens before they get anywhere near your product. Regional identity lets brands, and people, express genuine attachment to place without getting dragged into the fight about what the country means right now.

Who out there is doing it well?

Isle of Wight Tomatoes used to be called The Tomato Stall. Fine name. Completely invisible on shelf, because tomatoes were a commodity and consumer engagement with branded tomatoes in the UK was essentially zero. In 2023 they did something risky, they made the place the name. The whole identity built around one product promise, More Sunshine, More Flavour, because the Isle of Wight gets more sunshine hours than anywhere else in the UK. That’s verified Met Office data, and a brilliant provenance-led brand truth, a meteorological fact the brand gets to borrow.

Post this provenance-led rebrand, year-one growth up 45%. British Airways catering. Wimbledon. Export markets in the UAE, where the brand doubled sales in its first full year at Spinneys.

Weetabix is another interesting example because it’s complicated. All Weetabix Original wheat is sourced within 50 miles of the mills in Burton Latimer, Northamptonshire, a commitment they’re serious enough about to have campaigned for the land to be recognised as its own county “Weetabixshire.” Over 350 farmers participate in the scheme, growing 75,000 metric tonnes of wheat annually. This is an example of a mass-market brand turning its supply chain into a provenance story. Pretty strong proof against the argument that hyper-local is only for farm shops and delis.

There’s a version of this hyper-local led branding that makes it easy to dismiss, anything that just slaps the Union Jack on pack “Made with Great British (insert ingredient).” Turn the pack over and discover that ingredient was sourced from wherever and wherever was cheapest that quarter. A Which? investigation in 2024 found Aldi selling bacon and cheese wraps with a Union Jack and "Made in Britain" on the front, pork from the EU on the back. At the same Aldi, tomatoes from Morocco, parsley from Italy and sweet mini peppers from Spain sat beneath a large banner reading "Championing Great British Quality."

Consumers in FMCG are increasingly forensic. They will look. If the story on the front doesn’t match what’s actually happening, you end up with a serious credibility problem you can’t easily undo. This is why it needs to be rooted in truth.

A bit of balance

"British" itself isn't cancelled. Internationally, it still pulls. Barbour, Burberry, Land Rover, Scotch whisky…the mythology holds at a distance in Tokyo and Dubai in a way it doesn't quite anymore in Birmingham or Leeds. Distance does something flattering to a complicated identity, the specifics blur into something coherent. Up close, at home, it falls apart.

A caveat here, geography is only as good as the story attached to it. Place names alone are not a brand strategy. Imagine someone told you they’d bought a whisky made in Scunthorpe. The word does nothing for you, regardless of how good the liquid is. But give that whisky a real history, a named distiller, a specific grain from a specific field, and suddenly it’s a different conversation entirely.

Domestically in 2026, the “British” label is running out of room. Too contested to be comfortable. Too vague to be meaningful. I am not saying that "British" should be binned, just that "British" on its own isn't pulling its weight anymore. Consumers in 2026 are tracking supply chains, reading the back of pack, and Googling the farm. A vague national claim means they have more to search for and less to trust.

The brands winning on British shelves right now are saying exactly where they’re from, exactly who made it, and exactly why that place matters to what’s inside the packet. Not saying British.

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Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

Listen up babes, Monster Energy has made a drink for women. It’s called FLRT (pronounced “flirt,” because, like, women love flirting, get it?). OMG girlie and it comes in four flavours: Strawberry Fling, Guava Lava, Berry Tempting, and Sunset Squeeze. It has a daisy on the can. It burns fat, and it supports your collagen, so we can be, like, hawt. It’s totally “your new crush in a can” like the website says.
Finally! An energy drink my tiny woman hands can hold, and I’m not going to be frightened by the scary font on the monster cans, because like, my silly female brain couldn’t take it.

I am obviously joking, but take a moment. Sit with this brand for a sec, are we not horrified? Why, in 2026, are we still doing such insanely stereotypical gendered marketing? FLRT feels like execs were sat in a room and asked to mind map what they thought women liked.

Here’s what gets me, Monster already has a huge, devoted, deeply weird female fanbase. Monster’s female demographic is the fastest-growing segment of their consumer base, with women leaning heavily into the Ultra range, many of which already come in pink or white cans, with silver accents. Monster’s CEO admitted as much at investor day, saying “one of the major segments that we don’t service on a more comprehensive basis is the female segment.” The problem is that it’s wrong. They do service her. She just wasn’t on their radar.

The “Monster” girl is a fully formed cultural archetype. She’s the goth girl, the alt girl, the hospitality worker who’s been white cans since her third double shift of the week, the scene kid, the gamer, the one who knows every limited edition flavour by heart. Monster was never marketed to her, and she adopted it despite the fact it wasn’t. The brand is dark, a bit feral, and she thought it was in on the joke. She liked that. She made it hers.

The women who drink it have built an entire universe out of it. Monster nail art. Monster makeup looks. Monster can crowns for Halloween. Full sets of armour made from empty cans. DIY butterflies, face masks, battle axes. Nail techs selling Y2K Monster sets in black and green chrome for £70 a pop. Someone assembled a gun out of Strawberry Dream cans and photographed it in a bathroom mirror.

It also makes sense from a brand perspective, historically, Monster has spawned a legitimately unhinged product universe, from branded condoms, to apparel. The internet met all of this with matching chaos energy. That’s a brand community Monster stumbled into, and mistakenly and then completely ignored, by making her a daisy.

What makes FLRT worse is that they knew. Before the launch, the original website copy read: “energy should be as vibrant, fearless, and fun as the women who drink it.” The backlash came before the product even hit shelves. So they swapped “women who drink it” to “people who drink it” and launched it anyway. With the daisy, and with the fat-burning claim. Even the art direction on the brand photography is trying to push it to a more mature, less demeaning space, although still very Y2K girliepop energy.

The comments were, predictably, furious and funny in equal measure. “I think actual Monster cans are way cuter than the FLRT ones. I’d rather be seen drinking a Monster than a Flirt.” “Monster cans are literally already girly and cute.” “I literally have a tattoo of the Strawberry Dream Monster. She’s cutesy.” Someone suggested Monster should make a drink for boys if anything, and you know what, fair point.

The comment that caught my eye was “It’s giving Bic for Her.”

We’ve been here before. In 2012, Bic launched a pink pen called Bic for Her, a pen made specifically for our tiny female hands. Ellen DeGeneres spent four minutes taking it apart on national television. Bic took ages to recover.

A more recent example was in November 2025, Sky Sports launched a TikTok channel called Halo, branded as their “lil sis”, complete with pink sparkle emojis, matcha references and hot girl walk captions. Female sports fans who had been watching football and F1 for years were invited into a smaller, less serious room and told this one was just for them. Halo lasted three days. The internet made it a meme within 48 hours.

Each time, the pattern is identical. The brand spots a female audience. Rather than asking her what she wants, or simply giving her the same product, they build her a separate, smaller, pinker room. Almost like they’re saying: ew, cooties. Gen Z clocks this playbook immediately and they will call it out every single time.

They fundamentally missed the truth of their consumer. Monster isn’t drunk because it has collagen. It’s drunk because it’s cool, because it gets you through a six-hour hospitality shift, because it keeps you up for a raid, because it goes with the outfit. This shouldn’t be a brand for the matcha-drinking-pilates-princess. This is a brand for the gothy underdog. It always has been.

Monster had a community of women who tattooed their cans, wore their colours, and defended the brand unprompted for twenty years. FLRT is a bad launch that missed the brief. It also told those women exactly what Monster thought of them.

So what should Monster have done? Either look at the community already building entire universes out of your cans and give them something real to work with. Or go back to zero and find an actual consumer truth rather than a portfolio gap. The brands that get it right earn it by starting somewhere real. By developing an actual understanding of why someone picks up a can in the first place. Not because it burns fat. Because it gets them through the shift. Because it goes with the outfit. What they shouldn't have done is assume the women who already drink Monster needed a separate, smaller, softer version of it. Brands should position around a genuine need, not a cultural assumption.

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

So why fibre, and why now? And what even is fibermaxxing?!

Fibermaxxing is a trending TikTok-born movement structured around intentionally maximising your daily fibre intake through whole foods. beans, lentils, legumes, chia seeds (always chia seeds). You track your grams the way we track other macros. The target is 25g a day for women, 38g for men, which sounds reasonable until you learn that only 4% of adults meet the recommended 30g of fibre per day. The name follows the traditional Gen Z wellness naming conventions, along with looksmaxxing, sleepmaxxing, proteinmaxxing, basically just optimising a specific input for maximum output. On TikTok it looks like “can you eat 30 different plants this week” challenges, colourful bowls, and rippling abs.

Why is it trending now? Well, I believe it is in part due to how GLP-1 drugs have restructured how a significant chunk of consumers relate to food. We are already seeing smaller portioned options in supermarket ranges, and consumers favouring quality over quantity. Fibre is key for someone on a GLP-1 as it is satiating, gut-supporting, and metabolically useful. Perfect for someone eating less but thinking harder about what nutrients count. That mindset seems to be bleeding into mainstream consumer behaviour even among non-users. Mintel tracked 37,091 online conversations mentioning fibre-rich diets in 2025 alone, up 9% year on year. According to CNBC 54% of consumers say they’re interested in high-fibre food and drink, which rises to 60% among Gen Z. Whole Foods called fibre-forward callouts on-pack “the next big marketing play for 2026.”

So, now every brand manager in functional food and drink might be asking, “How do we get fibre claims on the front of pack?”

This is where it gets interesting for those of us operating in the UK. The GB Nutrition and Health Claims Register is incredibly stringent for on-pack health claims, and post-Brexit, it runs entirely separately from EU rules. To make a “high fibre” claim, the product needs at least 6g per 100g or at least 3 g of fibre per 100 kcal.
The ASA (Advertising Standards Agency) keenly enforces this, in 2023 they ruled against Kellogg’s All-Bran Prebiotic Oaty Clusters, because the ad claimed "prebiotic goodness to fuel your gut" and "prebiotic oaty clusters," linked to small print stating the product contained 5.4g of chicory root fibre per serving. This was ruled insufficient, at just 45% of what’s required for a daily intake. On top of that, HFSS advertising restrictions came into force in January 2026. The regulatory environment is tightening, and it is not playing.

What does this actually mean in practice? It means that your claim has to be scientifically substantiated, and if it can’t be, your brand needs to be able to survive without it. If you strip the claim, you need to know what’s left?

UK gut health brands like Hip Pop, and Living Things have been working in this world for years. They’ve cleared the bar.

Which brings us to Poppi, and it’s arrival to the UK.

Poppi was founded in 2015, built by a husband-and-wife team from Texas who appeared on Shark Tank and turned an apple cider vinegar dink into a $500m-a-year brand. Poppi rebranded from "Mother Beverage" in 2020 to align with a more modern, vibrant image aimed at Gen Z and Millennial consumers, shifting from a focus on solely apple cider vinegar to a "prebiotic soda". Marketing-wise, they proliferated at the intersection of gut health and pop culture, with massive features at Coachella, and at the Super Bowl, and used the likes of Hailey Bieber, Kylie Jenner, Alix Earle, and Charli XCX as brand partners. The concept was built around this being a bright, maximalist, fun soda that you can feel good about. Their on-pack taglines include "Be Gut Happy. Be Gut Healthy." and “Soda, that loves you back”. PepsiCo bought it in 2025 for $1.95bn.

However, in 2024, a class action suit was filed in California alleging Poppi misled consumers about gut health benefits. The product only contained 2g of inulin fibre per can, which plaintiffs argued was too low to create any meaningful gut health effect. Poppi settled in July 2025 for $8.9m. denied wrongdoing, but paid out anyway. So that’s the brand that arrived in the UK in March 2026.

It’s fundamentally the same recipe. 2g fibre per can. The GB Register requires 6g for a high fibre claim, so Carlsberg Britvic, who distribute it here, confirmed “We do not make a prebiotic claim for Poppi in the UK due to local regulations.” The prebiotic story, a fairly core aspect of the brand identity, is gone.

Additionally, I believe their brand will suffer slightly due to their retailer choices. They launched in Tesco and Pret a Manger, two environments that are nothing alike. Tesco is mass, accessible, and all about the meal deal. On the other hand, Pret is aspirational, for the urban professional but pretty mainstream. Neither are living in the cool-girl wellness shelf Poppi was built for. Hip Pop and Living Things are already there, with better fibre content and actual UK brand equity. We know the UK consumer is more sceptical of functional claims but more likely to trust them when they're substantiated. Poppi has arrived, shouting, but ultimately claim-free due to publicly having been told its claim was misleading in its home market, into a competitor set that’s actually living the values to a higher standard.

We are yet to see how this plays out, they have time because PepsiCo has the distribution muscle and the patience to buy shelf space and wait for the brand to find its feet. However, I wonder if this will become a cautionary tale about what happens when your claim is load-bearing for your brand and turns out not to hold up entirely.

The fibre opportunity for F&B is very trendy and real, but this is a warning, don’t chase trends, and make sure your claims hold up, especially if you are trying to break into new international markets.

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Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

Leather bombers. Long trenches. Slim sunglasses. Chunky knits. Guinness.

Girls who two years ago would have had an Aperol Spritz or a G&T without a second thought, were drinking the masculine, Irish, rugby-adjacent Guinness. The one your dad drinks. That one.

So why is the dark stuff suddenly the drink of choice for young women in the UK?

The numbers are staggering. Penetration among women is up 86% in two years. “Cool” perception of the brand among 18-24s tripled, from 22% to 67% between 2023 and 2025. One in nine pints poured in the UK is now a Guinness. This is a cultural landslide.

We could attribute this to Kim Kardashian posting a photo or Olivia Rodrigo wearing a “Guinness is Good 4 U” shirt at her Dublin show. I think the causation runs the other way, the celebrities were tapping into a moment that was already well underway. Splitting the G was spreading across TikTok before any of that. #guinness hit 161.2K posts. The misspelt #guiness hit 41.2K.

I think there are two drivers for this.

The first is blokette/laddette culture. There’s a strain of feminist counter-culture running through Gen Z right now that’s essentially about bucking the drink you’re supposed to order. Ordering a pint instead of a G&T is a small act of identity. TikTok comment sections saying “that girl energy, Guinness has always been that girl, the girls who get it get it ” are really driving that it’s about who you are when you walk to the bar.

The theatre of the pour helps here too. The surge and settle is closer to watching a cocktail being mixed tableside than a pint being pulled. The drink itself translates well to the screen, and is easily recognisable on the feed, because let's be honest, a Guinness is a good-looking pint. The deep, near-black body, the thick creamy head, the iconic tulip glass. It photographs beautifully. It looks deliberate and considered sitting on a table, which is more than can be said for a pint of lager. In a world where everything ends up on a story, a Guinness being poured is content. A Guinness on the table is an aesthetic. A pint of Carling is neither.

The drink earned its place in the visual language of a pub night out, and once it's in that visual language, it becomes part of the look.

The second thing is Irish cultural soft power, and Britain is deep in it right now. Grian Chatten. Paul Mescal in his GAA shorts. Andrew Scott. Fontaines DC. Kneecap. Say Nothing. House of Guinness on Netflix. Something shifted in the cultural weather and suddenly Ireland, its actors, its music, its accent, its attitude, has become the thing Britain can’t get enough of. Not the traditional, Lord of the Dance, leprechaun, and limericks version, but the real, modern, cool one.

What that has created is tribalism with an easy identifier. An in-group signal that costs £6.50 and comes with a two-minute wait. When a group of girls all order Guinness at the bar, they’re choosing a tribe. Showing they’re culturally fluent.

So why Guinness and not any other heritage beer?

Boddingtons have heritage. London Pride have heritage. Tetley’s have heritage. None of them are anywhere near this moment. So what does Guinness have that they don’t?

The historic ritual.

No other beer in the world has such specific rules applied to its pour. The two-part pull. The surge. The settle. The waiting. The precise angle of the glass. The creamy head that has to be just so. The splitting of the G. Other largers don’t have a way to tie the current to the past in the same way. They have heritage, but history without ritual is just age. So, when a TikTok trend, a celebrity moment, or a ‘blokette’ movement comes looking for somewhere to land, it finds real pre-existing culture to tap into, because Guinness has age and a ceremony.

From a brand strategy perspective, it’s an example of sometimes we get it backwards. We assume the brand leads and culture follows, that you target an audience, craft a message, pull people towards you. Guinness in 2026 shows us that sometimes culture moves first, and the only question is whether your brand has enough truth for the audience to grab onto.

The takeaway for brands, and the conversation agencies should be having with their clients far more honestly, is this: stop asking what culture you can attach yourself to and start asking what culture you actually have. What is genuinely, specifically, irreducibly yours? What does your brand do that nobody else does? What ritual, what language, what visual, what behaviour has accumulated around you over time that you could hand to a new audience and have them immediately understand?

Most brands spend enormous energy chasing culture, pivoting to new audiences, and manufacturing moments of relevance. Guinness did the long, unglamorous work of being consistently itself for two and a half centuries to become a 265-year overnight success.

Back in the beer garden, I overheard a girl telling her friend she’d never had a Guinness before. They’d all been splitting the G. She took a sip, paused, and said: oh, this is actually really nice.

She converted because the ritual was fun, the pint was good, and the brand had 265 years of truth behind it.

Culture moved towards Guinness. Guinness had somewhere for it to land.

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

Naming is hard.

It plays a significant role in making your business memorable, so there’s real pressure to get it right. There’s also brand equity at stake. Will it stand out in a crowded market? Can it be trademarked? Is the domain available? Does anyone else already have the name?

That’s why the Brand Spark process at KISS is so valuable. It brings the verbal side of your brand into focus on a single page. Naming becomes much easier when it’s not just based on personal taste, but rooted in your product or service offer.

We’ve taken part in many naming workshops and developed names for a wide range of brands - from Level X to Circe’s, to Melt Cult.

But one name that Matt (Strategic Director at KISS) developed earlier in his design career at London agency Springetts was for the global ice cream manufacturer Froneri.

The Connoisseur brand was originally created in Australia and acquired by Froneri in 2009. At this time, they wanted to launch a new super-premium ice-cream stick brand in Europe and beyond. Something with a distinct USP and more global appeal. Initially attempts were made by the Client to create new names of their own but they fell short of the mark. At this point, they reached out for creative expertise to get it right.

Naming needs criteria in which to work from, a strategy to measure against and create direction. In this case for this naming brief it was taste and adventure.

The naming process

Name exploration starts with big open thinking, grabbing sources of words and ideas from anywhere and everywhere. This could be maps, magazines, language dictionaries, films, games and everything in between. Names can come from anywhere. The knack here is knowing where to push the hunt and not giving in too early. With a broad list of ideas, all words are then filtered into the right or wrong pile.

Then cutting, merging, smashing and abbreviating, a real experimental mash up of words comes together to try and find the right name.

This carries on till you land on some strong contenders. Ones with promise that fit the criteria. These are then checked for existing use or trademarks and web domain availability. Once narrowed down to 3-4, we then capture the sentiment of each name with a moodboard to help really sell in the bigger idea and feeling of the name.

All of this gives the client confidence in the proposed ideas.

The chosen one

In a similar process to this, Matt uncovered the word Nui, which means ‘plenty’ in the language of Maori – very apt for a Pacific based brand. An exotic feeling, a sense of indulgence and adventure, reflecting accurately the benefits of this new product. With only one tweak, he added another ‘i’ to the word to complete the final name…Nuii.

Distinctive and evocative, ready to go head-to-head with Magnum.

Ten years on, Nuii has become a popular ice cream of choice in the freezer ailes at many supermarkets across the UK, continuing to bring adventurous flavours to consumers.

If naming feels stuck, try absorbing and remixing the ideas you’re already encountering. And when you need an outside spark, a creative team can bring fresh perspective and a large knowledge base to help shape an ownable name you can confidently run with.

“People are so keen to feel distinct enough to not be boring, but also aligned enough to be cool and in the right crowd… as well as your clothes or where you live, it’s the things you buy… it’s just a facility for your personality but in the form of a packet of crisps.”

Real Housewives of Clapton, Highsnobiety Status Economy Report, 2026

This is a quote that’s been living rent-free in my head recently. It came from the Real Housewives of Clapton, the anonymous Instagram account that has spent the last two years holding a mirror up to a very specific kind of East Londoner, the natural-wine-drinking, whippet-owning, Salomon-wearing creative professional who has gentrified Hackney and its surrounding postcodes.

It is, I’d argue, one of my favourite pieces of brand analysis published recently, and not written by a brand professional, but by a satirical meme account.

This is a piece about how that happened, how a Spanish crisp brand that has barely 13,500 Instagram followers and hasn’t changed its packaging since 2012 became one of the most culturally loaded products in East London, and what it can teach us about the new rules of cultural relevance.

There’s an Etsy print of a bag of Torres black truffle crisps next to a tin of Perelló olives, listed as “Hackney-inspired art.” It has sold for £25. People are framing a crisp packet and putting it above their sofa. When the Real Housewives of Clapton did a real-life collab with La Cave, a natural wine bar in Holborn, Torres truffle crisps and Perelló olives were the two hero items on the menu. Torres didn’t pitch that or sponsor it. An independent East London wholefood retailer built an entire “As Seen on RHOC” product shelf with the same two items as the canonical picks. The Hackney Post used “off-licences now selling Torres crisps and £5 olives” as shorthand for the entire story of a borough’s gentrification.

None of this cultural capital was built through traditional acts of marketing. 71% of consumers now say groceries are a form of lifestyle expression or cultural capital. 62% say a stranger’s fridge tells them how culturally clued-in that person is.
When luxury fashion became oversaturated and unaffordable, people took the same status-signalling logic and migrated it somewhere more accessible. Torres landed in the middle of that cultural move to cultural goods over fashion, at exactly the right moment, with exactly the right product.

“So it was luck”

Well, yes and no, here’s how I think they did it.

The distribution decision

The strategic heart of this story is a stocking decision.

Over the last few years, Torres moved from being stocked in farm shops to natural wine bars. The venues you choose choose you back. They confer meaning. Getting stocked at Furanxo or Mother Superior places Torres within a very specific set of values. The product didn’t change, but the context did. Context, in brand terms, does a lot of heavy lifting.

This is also how Torres and Perelló ended up culturally fused, although not through any formal partnership, but they were consistently seen in the same rooms. Same counter, same stockist, same cultural representation. An audience that kept encountering them together, repeatedly, in the same kinds of spaces started to understand them as a pair. The Etsy print puts them side-by-side, the RHOC menu puts them together.

Cultural consumers say they are 4x less likely to be influenced by traditional advertising than the average consumer, only 6% say an advert makes them more likely to try something. However, 26% say seeing a product in a local café or deli does, and 58% say a friend’s recommendation is the biggest driver. Torres’s distribution strategy mapped almost perfectly onto that discovery system. They showed up in credible spaces. Credible people found them there. Those people told other people.

The product did the work too

Distribution strategy alone doesn’t explain it. Plenty of products sit on natural wine bar shelves and go nowhere.

Torres has three things that make it unusually draftable as an identity object. Firstly, flavour distinctiveness (to name a few: black truffle, Iberico ham, and fried egg). Secondly, a price point that sits precisely in the considered-treat category, expensive enough to feel like a choice, not so expensive as to feel absurd (at about £5 per bag). And thirdly, the packaging.

Torres’s visual identity hasn’t changed since 2012. In a world of relentless brand refreshes, that constancy compounds into something that reads, over time, as deep self-assurance. It never needed to update itself because it was true to the brand already. Everything around it has dated.

Its strength also lies in its simplicity. In 2026, packaging doesn’t just have to compete on shelf, it competes on feeds. Products are encountered as image first, detached from price or context, and the ones that matter circulate through group chats, meme pages, and feeds as cultural objects. RHOC’s own verdict on this: “The look of a product is one million percent more important than what the product tastes like. I can’t underestimate how important it is.” Torres’s bag is bold, confident, and immediately legible at scroll speed. That matters more now than any amount of on-shelf premium positioning.

Why not marketing is marketing

Torres has only about 13,500 Instagram followers. It is not the traditonal social footprint of a brand that has achieved this level of cultural penetration. We could understand this to mean the penetration wasn’t built through social reach, or digital following.

What’s also interesting is that Torres didn’t abandon their socials during this repositioning. Around 2023-24 the Instagram aesthetic shifted. Out went the bright, white, classic product photography that looked like every other premium food brand. In came something richer-toned, more textured, closer to the visual world of the spaces that were now stocking them. They started to create content that looked like someone who actually drinks natural wine took it. That’s the difference between a brand that’s trying to join a culture and a brand that already authentically lives in it.

IYKYK (if you know, you know) feels like a key part of what makes status items cool in 2026. It operates on scarcity of knowledge. The product can’t feel targeted at you, it has to feel like you discovered it. Part of what makes Torres function as identity shorthand is that not everyone knows it. When you put it on your picnic blanket in London Fields, you’re communicating membership of a group with a certain kind of taste literacy, and that only works if Torres hasn’t been on a billboard.

Torres’s TikTok presence is non-existent, and the hashtag is almost entirely content created by the venues that stock it. Bars filming their shelves. Wine shops showing their counters. Natural wine spaces are using it to signal their own credentials through what they carry. Torres didn’t make or commission that content. It works because the recommendations are coming from somewhere else. For these kinds of consumers, trust is earned in intimate circles, a friend’s recommendation, discovery in a local deli, or the feed of a niche creator. Scale without credibility erodes status and perceived quality. Torres grew by being discovered in credible spaces.

What brands can actually take from this

I can’t create a step-by-step, replicable playbook. You cannot brief your way into becoming someone’s identity shorthand. But there are things we can learn.

1. Distribution is a brand strategy. Where you’re stocked tells people what you are before they’ve tasted you. The decision about which stockists to pursue, and which to decline, might be one of the most powerful brand decisions a founder can make.

2. Consistency compounds, when your brand is true. The packaging that looked right in 2012 looks even more right in 2026, precisely because it didn’t move. Consistency accrues value in a way that chasing trends never does.

3. Silence, in the right context, reads as confidence. Torres showed up, consistently, in spaces that already carried cultural weight, and trusted the right people to find them.

Finally, product quality is the foundation on which none of this works without. Ultimately, cultural cachet built on a mediocre product collapses the first time someone actually tries it. Torres earned its place in the room because it is, frankly, pretty delicious.

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

Everyone in the UK has a Freddo memory. Getting one with their pocket money. Finding one in their lunchbox. Handing over a coin at the corner shop.

And now Freddo costs 35p, it used to cost 10p. Freddo’s price rise has outpaced official UK inflation by a country mile. It’s also smaller, 20g to 18g. What I think really annoys people about it, is that there was never an announcement. No explanation. It just happened. Everyone chalked it up to corporate greed, and it left a sour taste in our mouths that couldn’t be fixed by chocolate.

Freddo is the mascot for something much bigger: a decade of brands making thousands of small, optimised decisions to give people less while charging them more. Shrinkflation.

In 2026, the question we keep asking in brand is why consumers are so hard to hold. Why Gen Z won’t commit. Why loyalty is collapsing. We should be asking what we’ve given them to be loyal to?

Here’s the thing about shrinkflation in particular: it operates on a flawed assumption. As Chandramouli Nilakantan, CEO TRA Research, puts it “brands believe consumers are more resistant to visible price increases than to subtle reductions in size or quality, especially for low-priced, high-frequency products.” That assumption is wrong. While consumers may not clock the changes right away, awareness builds steadily over time, particularly in categories with habitual use and familiar packaging. You know what a Freddo feels like in your hand. You know what a Quality Street tin sounds like when it’s full.

Loyalty is not a transactional phenomenon. It involves, as Nilakantan describes it, a complex cognitive-emotional mix of confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and the psychological commitment that becomes part of a consumer’s self-identity. Once trust is integrated into someone’s worldview, any violation, especially from a long-trusted brand, triggers a disproportionately strong emotional backlash. They have been betrayed.

Cadbury fans, similarly, have integrated that brand into their self-concept. Into their childhood. Into their Christmas. So when the bar gets smaller without warning, the outrage is always disproportionate to the size of the change. It’s not about 10 grams. It’s about what 10 grams represents. The other problem is that it’s a pattern.

A pattern most notable in Quality Street.

Quality Street is a Christmas ritual. The tin going round the room, the wrappers mixed with wrapping paper, the personality test of whether you eat the green triangle or not. In 2013 you got 789 grams for roughly what you pay today, according to the Jersey Consumer Council. Now you get 600. The tin has been cut from 1kg to 820g to 720g to 600g, that’s a 17% reduction in the last cut alone, confirmed by Nestlé. And someone on TikTok was counting last year. 137 chocolates in a tin in 2006. 119 in 2009. 84 in 2016. 67 in 2024.

Yes, cocoa costs more. Yes, global trade is harder. But this felt less like a supply chain story and more like a slow, sustained decision to give people less while hoping they wouldn’t notice. While people would be frustrated and upset about the reduction. The main issue was nobody was told. Treating consumers like adults who will figure things out, who will literally sit down and count the chocolates, should be part of the strategy. Because they will count. They did count.

The business model

I’d love to argue this is just a few bad actors. However, in too many cases, it’s the business model.

Someone ran the numbers on a smaller Twirl multipack with one less bar. Someone signed off on the Quality Street tin at 600 grams. Someone decided that loyalty programme points would expire. These are optimised decisions across categories.

McVitie’s Digestives, down from 400 grams to 360, as reported by IBTimes UK. The humble digestive the builder’s tea biscuit. Penguin and Club multipacks lost a bar. The meal deal, once a simple, honest lunchtime contract, is now a two-tier upsell machine. Tesco’s standard deal has had multiple price rises since 2022, and the premium deal sits at £5 now. The premium tier gets positioned as the reasonable choice. People aren’t being given more options. They’re being funnelled upward out of something they used to just get.

Now there’s a commercial consequence to all of this. Private label is winning, and not because it’s cheaper, but because to the consumer it feels more honest. M&S launched a 1.2kg tub of chocolates in familiar colours and familiar flavours, specifically as an alternative to the perpetually shrinking branded tins. They didn’t undercut Quality Street on price. They out-Quality-Streeted them on quantity. What was once an extremely safe branded space is now contested territory. The threat was never the discount brand, it was the brand that could keep the tin full.

What this has actually done

None of these decisions alone would break a relationship. Brand loyalty runs deep, especially among Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials who built real affective bonds with these products over decades.

But incrementally, over years, these decisions have changed how people shop. Don’t trust the packaging. Don’t assume the weight. Check the unit price. Read the label. Once people have developed the habit of squinting at the shelf, they cannot unlearn it. The whole category pays for the behaviour of the worst actors. With just 8% of Brits describing themselves as truly loyal to their favourite brands, and 77% of consumers now retracting loyalty faster than they did three years ago. Brands no longer command loyalty. Consumers now expect brands to earn it continuously, and too many big brands have broken their side of that bargain.

A collab won’t fix it. Loyalty points only go so far. Rebuilding trust is slow, consistent work.

Radical transparency, what actually works?

The brands holding loyalty right now aren’t doing anything clever. They’re just not taking away from the experience. They kept the Quality Street tin full, and when they couldn’t, they said so.

That’s the whole strategy. Acknowledge the reality, explain the reason, and treat consumers like adults.

Tony's Chocolonely faced the same cocoa crisis as every other chocolate brand, cocoa prices up 233% on global markets. Rather than shrink the bar, they raised the price, published a full explanation on their website, and publicly committed to keeping the bar the same size. Sales went up.

So if your growth strategy involves gradually cutting what you offer while holding the price, the consumer who tolerated that is already moving. In a low-trust era, quality is a differentiator. Being good at what you do is a competitive advantage because the bar is on the floor. A smaller, sharper brand that keeps its promises will outlast a bigger one that doesn’t.

The brands that survive the next decade will be the ones that keep the tin full. Who remembered that Freddo is just a frog and Quality Street is just a tin of chocolate, but understood what they represent, and how they get counted.

In 2026, everyone is counting.

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding

Because right now, friendship is aspirational in a way that romance just… isn’t.

Matter’s 2026 insights said that in the US, only 38% of single women are actively dating, compared to 61% of single men. Vogue recently asked whether having a boyfriend is now embarrassing. Boysober discourse is flourishing, and there are movements like Korea’s 4B, as well as a dissatisfaction with dating apps. With Gen Z’s attitude to romance cooling fast, friends-first lifestyles are the new aspiration.

For a growing number of women, being single with a strong circle of friends is more aspirational than being in an all-encompassing relationship. I would argue romance no longer carries the same cultural or commercial weight it once did.

Why Galentine’s?

If you didn’t know, Galentine’s Day is celebrated on February 13th, it’s an unofficial holiday dedicated to celebrating female friendships and platonic love, originating from Parks and Recreation and summed up perfectly by the phrase “ladies celebrating ladies.”

Google Trends shows a consistent year-on-year increase in UK searches for “Galentine’s,” with “Galentine’s ideas” starting to follow the same upward pattern. Women are actively searching for, planning, and organising these events. And crucially, women in relationships are attending too. The addressable market for Galentine’s is significantly bigger than for traditional Valentine’s.

The commercial behaviours are product-driven

Traditional Galentine’s activities tend to cluster around a few specific categories: crafting together, cooking and baking, cocktails and drinks, sharing food, and sometimes watching a terrible rom-com together.

These are product-driven moments. Group behaviours. Purchases that serve three to four people, not just two. The commercial opportunity here arguably exceeds that of traditional Valentine’s Day.

The partnership opportunities are wide open

If brands went in on this angle, there’s so much room to play! Think about what brands could do in this space:

An M&S Galentine’s bundle, cocktails and picky bits for four. Or a Lush x Hotel Chocolat partnership, face masks and sharing boxes for a girls’ night in. Søstrene Grene DIY craft sets for four, paired with a prosecco brand. Buzzballz or a similar RTD brand leaning into friendship bracelet trinkets and four-packs. Beauty brands creating “girls’ night” sets.

The space is currently uncrowded, and there are no examples of it being elevated. A brand that committed to owning Galentine’s now would also earn much consumer trust, the halo of being seen as a “girls’ brand” or a “friendship brand” extends well beyond a single campaign moment.

I think the sectors that would be best positioned to profit are food, drink, beauty, and craft. Basically, anyone selling products that feel better shared.

How can your brand use this across the year?

Galentine’s is the most obvious entry point, but it’s not the only one. The brands paying attention are already scanning further ahead, looking at the cultural moments that aren’t traditionally celebrated and finding search volume, real spending behaviour and zero competition waiting for them.

Take "girls' trip" culture. Google Trends shows consistent year-on-year growth in UK searches for "girls' trip" and "girls' weekend." Women are organising multi-day experiences together and spending on getting there, but also spending on the prep, the outfits and the group makeup.

Women are even making rituals out of seeing their favourite musicians live, Taylor Swift's Eras Tour saw the average fan spend $1,300 per show on travel, outfits, food and merchandise, with bead shops near tour cities reporting sales up 500% from fans making friendship bracelets together. Sabrina Carpenter's Short n' Sweet Tour was described by fans and press alike as a "slumber party with the girls.” Fans coordinated outfits, shared GRWM TikToks, and recreated her corsets and rhinestone boots. Pinterest searches for 'Sabrina Carpenter concert outfits' spiked sharply with each tour leg, peaking at their highest point when the European dates launched in February/March 2025. Charli XCX's Brat, named Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year, became less an album than a group identity, with fans coordinating lime-green outfits and travelling to shows together. In 2024, music tourism in the UK alone hit £10 billion, a 26% increase, driven in large part by these three artists.

The same logic applies to female sports spectatorship. The Women's Euro 2022 final peaked at 17.4 million UK viewers, beating Eurovision 2022. By 2023, the Women's Sport Trust recorded 46.7 million UK viewers of women's sport annually. These are engaged viewers too, regular women's sport fans are 3.5x more likely to buy a product promoted by a woman athlete than any other influencer type. The viewing party is a product occasion sitting completely unclaimed, with drinks, snacks and outfits, are all presenting a real spending opportunity. Nobody owns it yet.

The pattern is consistent across all of it. Women organising for themselves, in groups, with real money behind it. The products are already there. What’s missing is the positioning.

The opportunity is already in your catalogue

For brands that already have bundle formats, party sizes, or group-friendly products, like sculpt clay group sets, sharing boxes, or multi-serve formats, they’d be able to own a category with minor reframing. The product is there. What these brands seem to be missing is the cultural context.

I think the brand that is the first to own the term “Galentine’s ideas,” “girls’ night in,” or “girls’ trip essentials” consistently, across multiple years, would build something a Valentine’s Day campaign never could. Your brand could be the answer to what women are asking all year round.

Where does that leave Valentine's Day?

Romance had a good run. But, I believe the most commercially interesting love story right now isn’t between two people, it’s between a woman and her people.

The brands still organising their entire year around traditional celebrations are working from an outdated map. Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Christmas, these moments are crowded, expensive and increasingly disconnected from how a growing number of women actually live and spend. I believe the real opportunity is in the white space, the cultural moments with search volume, genuine spending behaviour, and no brand brave enough to claim them yet.

Galentine’s is one. Girls’ trips are one. Female sports spectatorship is one. The slumber party, the group concert, the pre-match ritual, these are all product occasions hiding in plain sight.

The audience is there. The spending is there. The only thing missing is a brand bold enough to move away from tradition and to pay attention to the culture.

That brand might as well be yours.

Written by Eve Macdonald
Creative Growth at Kiss Branding