Forming: my read on what the culture/brand/your algo is about to lean into
Before the trends, a confession. Today I shipped my first product.
“Shipped” is developer speak. (Well, “to ship” is also Gen Z speak for wanting two people to get together, but for this post we’re using the developer version.) It means you stopped tinkering and put the thing out into the world where people can actually use it. I’ve worked in marketing for fourteen years, and I’ve launched campaigns, magazines, brands and other people’s products, but I have never once built something myself, from nothing, and pressed the button. Today I did, and I’ve been grinning at my laptop like a child on Christmas morning ever since.
It’s called Signals by Social Mode, and it lives at signals.red. It’s a trend radar for the UK and the GCC: the big, slow shifts (and the fast, disposable ones) in how people live and spend, what the major global reports agree on, how differently each trend lands in London and in Dubai, and what a brand should actually do about it. The radar is free. The deeper thinking behind it will live here, on Substack.
I built it in just under a week, with AI as my thinking partner, no developer and almost no budget. A few years ago that sentence would have been impossible to even comprehend. Now we can sit at our dining tables working with AI, shipping things from our imagination out into the big wide web. Which is a big part of why there’s a new trend at the bottom of this list.
A few months ago I made a video about the seven things I thought were about to take over the conversation. It was my first trend-led video, and it’s still the post that’s done the most to push Social Mode forward, so here they are again, properly this time, with the reasoning behind each one. Plus two I’ve added since.
1. The trust economy
People are buying who they believe, not just what works. When every product claims the same results and every ad looks the same, the tiebreaker becomes the person you trust to tell you the truth about it. It’s why creator-led brands keep doing well, why so many businesses now put a founder’s face on the front, and why one honest review can move more product than a whole campaign.
Trust takes years to build. One bad partnership can destroy it. Expect more people to start treating it like the asset it is.
2. The intellectual influencer
Nuance is having a moment. For years the feed rewarded certainty: hot takes, hard rules, one-line answers. Now the accounts I see growing fastest are the ones willing to think out loud, cite something, change their mind, and say “it depends” before explaining what it depends on. Long captions are back, and so are essays. Not everything is ‘dead’ any more, thank God.
3. Cosplaying your job
More people are performing their jobs online, for the algorithm rather than the paycheque. Lawyers, nurses, pilots and bankers are finding that the texture of their work has an audience. Expertise has become content, and the perspective a job gives you is starting to be worth more than the job itself. Don’t tell me you don’t follow your dentist on Instagram. I know you do.
4. Wellness getting grounded
Less biohacking, more basics. After a few years of cold plunges, twelve-step morning routines and a supplement for every hour of the day, the mood is moving back towards sleep, walking, protein, daylight and friends. The expensive, complicated version of wellness is starting to look a little try-hard, and the simple version is starting to look confident.
5. Touch grass. Literally.
Running clubs, supper clubs, walking groups and book clubs keep growing. We’re spending more time online than ever and we’re lonely, and the fix people are choosing is physical and in person. Don’t get me started, though, on brands swapping the word ‘customers’ for ‘community’. Please, it needs to stop. For brands and creators, what matters is whether you can get people to come and meet you IRL, and whether they still want to hang out with each other once you’ve left. That’s a community, not just customers.
6. Muscles over skinny
The body ideal is shifting from small to strong. Strength training has gone mainstream for women in a way that would have felt niche ten years ago, and the language has moved with it: from shrinking to building, from “toned” to strong. It will keep reshaping fashion, food, fitness and the whole wellness category.
7. Mitochondria
It’s about to be a household word. Energy, longevity and cellular health are moving out of scientific papers and into mainstream wellness marketing. I’d bet on seeing “mitochondrial health” on packaging you’d never expect within the next year or two.
8. The AI ick
AI content is everywhere, and so is the ick it gives people. It isn’t really the technology they object to. It’s the pretending: an outfit that doesn’t exist, a “curated” feed nobody curated, a luxury campaign made by a prompt. I’m starting to see brands put “no AI” clauses into creator contracts, and I think “made by humans” becomes something people actively look for and pay more for. Luxury has always meant somebody made it.
(Yes, I see the irony of putting this next to a product I built with AI. I don’t think the two cancel out. The ick, I think, is about value, effort and how you describe what you’ve made, and of course whether it’s good for us and the planet.)
9. The kitchen-table builder
This is the new one, and I added it after building something at my new dining table. Very meta.
The cost of making a real product has collapsed. Not a pitch deck or an idea in a notes app, but a working website, a tool, an app, a small piece of software that does a job. Things that needed a developer, an agency and a five-figure budget two years ago, one person can now build at their kitchen table over a few evenings.
If that keeps going, and I think it will, then by the end of 2027 a lot of us will be building all kinds of things. Not unicorns. Small, useful, specific things, made for a particular community, a particular city, a particular problem the big platforms will never bother to solve.
And here’s the bit I keep turning over. For twenty years the internet pushed everything towards global scale. Go big or don’t bother. Maybe the next wave pushes the other way. Maybe it brings back the mum-and-pop shop, the kitchen-table business, the person who makes a living serving a few thousand people really well instead of chasing a few million. Local again, but with better tools.
I could be wrong. Cheap tools also mean more competition, and building something was never the hard part. Getting people to care about it still is. But for the first time in a long time, the barrier to starting is close to zero, and that changes who gets to have a go.
What links them
Read the list back and most of these point the same way. People are tired of the frictionless, the fake and the over-optimised. They want real people, real rooms and real thinking, and more and more of them want to make something of their own.
That’s what Signals is for: tracking shifts like these, properly, as they move. Have a look at signals.red, click around the radar, and tell me which trend you’re already feeling. And if you’re building something at your own kitchen table, I’d genuinely love to hear what it is.