Something I completely took for granted about working agency-side in comms: we always come up with a catchy name for something. I know this is very much a thing when pitching ideas to clients, but I didn’t realise just how ingrained it was in my psyche until a conversation with a new colleague this week.
Andy’s background is more in-house than consultancy, and he gently lamented the fact that to get any internal initiative away in an agency, it needs a name. There’s immense power in giving something a name.
Back in 2003, an old colleague of mine and I put together a list of what we believed were the essential elements of starting a great band. I can’t recall much of what was on the list, apart from “if in doubt about what to wear, wear black”, but I do remember what number one was: have a great name.
The “giving something a name to give it power” trope works not just when labelling original ideas; it’s also the quintessential factor in naming a trend that everyone sees but can’t quite describe.
We most often ascribe these labels to music - grunge, Britpop, crunk, mumble rap. It’s easy to get wrapped up in arguing about what is grunge and what isn’t (‘Are Dinosaur Jr grunge or post-hardcore?’ I asked myself just the other week). But specificity isn’t the point - these are broad, catch-all terms that provide a way to describe movements and constellations of ideas to people who don’t understand them.
As musical tribes have become less defined and less pronounced in the age of streaming, recent examples of these trends have tended to be broader, cutting across fashion, music, food, design and so on. Think of the hipster and hipster tropes of craft beer and artisan food. Think of wellness, clean living and digital detoxes. One of the more influential naming conventions turns ten this year - it was 2014 when the K-Hole coined the term “normcore”, spawning endless -core suffixed trends (#corecore is the latest).
If you’re not familiar with normcore, this excellent essay unpacks its meaning, background and cultural impact. But in short, normcore became the trope for dressing to deliberately blend in. In a reaction to the early days of social, where standing out was vital, normcore was about wearing “ardently ordinary clothes”. Like any good trend, it celebrated what was happening while also becoming a lightning rod for media ridicule. “So dressing normally is a trend now, is it?”.
It might have seemed ridiculous at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, we can place normcore in the rare bucket of trends that genuinely describe a significant shift happening in the world. As Delia Cai puts it in her piece, “You can even see its influence on our current fascination with “quiet luxury””. Fashion start-ups pushing “quality basics” still dominate my social ads (perhaps saying more about me than anything else).
You could easily align normcore-thinking with the “dark forest” theory of the internet. The idea that saying something bold and provocative is most likely to only bring opprobrium and angst, such is the state of Twitter. It’s best not to stand out on your public socials, to blend in and keep your honest thoughts and opinions to your WhatsApp groups and Discord servers. You can see it in the rise of the work-fluencer over the traditional “influencer”, of “the windows into the radically normal” that reflect our world of high prices and austerity more accurately than “jet-setting influencers and solopreneurs” (from
’s fine piece on the same topic).The challenge, of course, is that we can only see the power of the “normcore” label in retrospect. It may have ballooned beyond its original context, its perceived misappropriation frustrating the team at K-Hole. But it is undoubtedly a term that has taken on a life and power of its own over the past ten years.
While normcore has had a long shelf life, it wasn’t chosen to be the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year for 2014 - it was on the shortlist, according to the Ssense piece. 2014’s word of the year was “vape”, which, given the prevalence of vaping today, you probably can’t argue with (even if “normcore” is a more entertaining word).
Looking back through some of the other words of the year since 2014 highlights the difficulty of defining the zeitgeist without the benefit of hindsight.
Here’s the list in full:
2014: vape
2015: 😂 (the crying laughing emoji)
2016: post-truth
2017: youthquake
2018: toxic
2019: climate emergency
2020: unprecedented
2021: vax
2022: goblin mode
2023: rizz
Some of these words will likely take you straight back in time - unprecedented must have been the easiest choice for word of the year ever, immediately conjuring up the different universe of the pandemic and its associated lockdowns.
Post-truth felt apt in 2016, summarising the new, unfettered political campaigning mindset ushered in by Brexit and Trump. In 2024, it feels a rather quaint concern—we’re so far beyond ‘post-truth’ now that we don’t even know where we are.
It’s also hard to believe that emojis were only officially deemed to be a ‘thing’ in 2015 (selfie is equally surprisingly young, 2013’s word of the year).
Of the words that made it, only one feels as though it still has the legs and relevance that normcore arguably does in 2024. We’re still living through a climate emergency, so it’s still important to use language that highlights the urgency of the situation—if anything, even more critical.
I’ll be honest and say I had to Google “goblin mode” (never heard of it) and “rizz” (to remind myself exactly what they meant). To be fair to the team at the Oxford Dictionary, they’re picking words, not trends. A word may describe a trend, but it’s not guaranteed. Sometimes it’s just a word.
Looking back at ten years of normcore, of words of the year (or even of “the fastest growing ‘How To Make’ searches in the UK”—thanks, BBH) tells us that not all zeitgeists and trends carry equal weight.
The key is to try to judge which trends represent a moment in time and which ones reflect something more profound in popular culture. There’s no surefire recipe for making this distinction, but some factors must be kept in mind.
Firstly, where is the trend coming from? Is there a critical mass of people you can tangibly see involved in an activity, or is it (as is invariably the case with new tech) concentrated within a small self-perpetuating echo chamber? Social audio was a thing, briefly, during the pandemic. It was undoubtedly interesting, but its usage was firmly concentrated in Silicon Valley - it never made the leap into the real world.
It’s also worth asking how much breadth an idea or a trend has. Is it attached to a rigid way of thinking or a singular vision, or does it have memetic qualities that allow people to make it their own? Coming straight from science fiction, the metaverse was too rigid a definition. VR is not mainstream. It’s not going to happen. But that shouldn’t obscure the fact that people DO spend lots of time on gaming platforms doing things other than gaming. Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft are still massively popular games that offer opportunities for brands and businesses looking to reach their audiences. But they are not “the metaverse”.
The third factor I’d suggest considering is time. How long has the trend been brewing, and where has it come from? The most exciting trends are the slow-moving, less noticeable ones - the slow move from newsfeeds to private messaging and disappearing Stories. The removal of the ‘social’ elements of social media platforms, leaving them as vehicles of entertainment. The rise of Musical.ly, the app that Bytedance bought and turned into TikTok, proving the concept of short-form vertical video. These kinds of trends are less likely to have a catchy name, but not always - but of course, having a name makes them more memorable and more likely to capture people’s attention.
Just like when you’re thinking about starting a band, when considering trends, the name is everything. Sometimes a great name can paper over the cracks and get you unwarranted attention for a short time (older readers might remember Gay Dad getting a whole bunch of front covers in the late nineties. See also: the Harlem shake). But sometimes a great name captures something happening in the zeitgeist, bringing something new into the spotlight that shines on for months and years (in the wake of The Strokes initial success, every band was ‘The’ band). Those are the trends (and the bands) worth watching out for.