The origin of trends

We no longer live in a monoculture where one song?owns?a year, like "Crazy In Love" did in 2003 (and it still sounds box-fresh after twenty years). But if we were to try and pick a song to define 2022, "Running Up That Hill" is undoubtedly the front-runner.

ICYMI, the opener from Kate Bush's album Hounds Of Love, was a permanent fixture of Stranger Things 4.

After (re)discovering the song, its new audience has endlessly remixed and meme-d it, and its new-found popularity even brought its famously reclusive?composer out to comment on the trend.

Clearly, "Running Up That Hill" is a great song. Stranger Things is a great show. So it's not surprising that the song became a hit again thirty years after its original release. But one of the great things about Stranger Things is the soundtrack, and it's used plenty of great tracks across its four seasons. So why did "Running Up That Hill" strike such a chord and move beyond "getting a bump in Spotify numbers" to a genuine, bona fide trend? What is it about "Running Up That Hill", Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams", and Boney M's "Rasputin " (no, seriously) in particular?

A lot of other people have asked that question. Google "Running Up That Hill", and the top "People also ask" question is "Why is Running Up That Hill so popular now?". The only answer you get is Stranger Things 4 + TikTok = song of the summer.

The TikTok effect has, of course, played its part. Like Dreams and Rasputin, Running Up That Hill has a highly active second life on the platform - meme-d, remixed and duetted with glee.

And we know that certain songs lend themselves to being more "TikTokable" than others. "Experts" tell budding musicians to use short, catchy hooks.?Pre-bake the meme into the track . Use a massive bass drop or some other musical u-turn to fit in with users' love of switching halfway through a video.

But that's like saying, "your video needs to grab a viewer's attention in the first three seconds" - it's a generic template; it's not a recipe for success that anyone can replicate.

Plenty of other production companies will carefully scour the back catalogues of other vaguely alternative female artists from the 80s, with that template in mind, to manufacture the next "Running Up That Hill" moment.

But "because it’s trending on TikTok" doesn't answer the core question of why “Running Up That Hill” is quite so big and why it has blown up now. People will try and replicate the same conditions, but we often don’t really know why a song or a meme catches like this. We can look in the rearview mirror for clues, but sometimes those clues don’t add up to a credible bank of evidence.

As banal as it sounds, sometimes a trend just catches on. Football chants are an excellent example of this. "Will Grigg's on fire " in 2016; "September " by Earth, Wind and Fire in 2018; "Whole Again " by Atomic Kitten last year. Sometimes a song is just right for the moment - it literally strikes a chord, and suddenly everyone wants to talk about it and share it with everyone they know.

If you could work out the formula for these cultural zeitgeist moments, you could probably become significantly wealthy. Mercifully, I don't get many "we want to make a viral video" or "we want something like the ice bucket challenge" briefs across my desk anymore. But brands and businesses DO still crave that kind of fame, even if they know that it is a) tough to manufacture and b) will likely come with some form of backlash.

The Pudding did?a great visualisation of how vanishingly rare ?it is for musical artists to make it big. It is a tiny, tiny percentage of recorded music that makes it to that level.

(As a side note, if you'd like to understand that sentiment in more colourful language, I highly recommend one of my favourite books,?Kill Your Friends .)

I've not seen anyone crunching the numbers similarly for brand campaigns. Still, I would wager that the odds of one of them genuinely becoming a cultural phenomenon in the vein of "Running Up That Hill" are even less likely than a band having a hit single. Off the top of my head, I'd nominate the Budweiser "Wassup" spot; Tango's "banned in school playgrounds" slap (big in my school playground); Gregg’s vegan sausage roll launch.

Some brands aspire to "create culture "; in my experience, very few do. Unless you're privileged as a brand, I advise striving for cultural relevance instead. Like the recipe for creating a great campaign or a TikTokable piece of music, bring culturally relevant sounds easy on paper. In practice, it takes hard work, dedication and a lot of critical judgement.

Firstly, you need to know what's happening in our culture, which takes time and effort. Second, as I mentioned, there's no longer a single monoculture to understand. You need to understand what's happening in the feeds, private chats and Discord servers of your particular audience(s). You also need to decide what is sticky with those audiences and isn't just a one-day/one-week topic of conversation - because by the time your idea's been approved, and the assets are ready, that 'trend' may well be long gone. And thirdly, as with many aspects of brand communications, timing is everything. To successfully jump on a trend, you must be at the vanguard with first-mover status. Take too long, and you'll have missed the boat.

I vividly remember an SXSW panel about memes from 2019, where one of the panellists said the moment a brand starts using a meme, that meme is officially over. Being an eternal optimist, I view that as harsh. I'd adapt it to "when EVERY brand starts using a meme, it's officially over". If you waited until September to do something around "Running Up That Hill", the bandwagon was long gone. The key to relevance is to spot the trends as they're catching fire - you can't leave it until they're all burnt out.