When the Internet Turns Orange, Who Actually Wins?

Taylor Swift’s announcement of her 12th album sent the internet into a glittery, orange-tinted spiral. Within hours, airlines, snack brands, sports teams, and bookstores had switched their feeds to match the vibe. Major outlets chronicled the wave in real time: the colors, the puns, the quick-hit creative.

That is the visible part of a cultural moment: the relevance spike. Everyone is in the feed. Everyone looks current. 

And everyone looks the same.

That’s because there’s a quieter test happening here. Brands are trying to look relevant – trying to actually be relevant – by chasing a flashy cultural trend. But… is it working?

What does “working” even look like?

Who is actually earning resonance, the kind of cultural connection that still matters after the scroll? The answer matters, because only brands who build cultural resonance stay relevant after the trendy moment passes.

The difference between showing up and belonging

Relevance is borrowed attention. Resonance is remembered meaning.

One brand’s post fades into the orange crowd. Another’s gets passed around inside group chats. The difference is fluency. The second brand understands the codes of the culture it is stepping into.

Petco did this well. While countless brands posted generic orange visuals, Petco tapped into something far more specific: Taylor Swift’s well-documented love of her cats. To Swifties, especially those who know Meredith, this wasn’t just a random animal reference. It was an insider nod that made sense coming from a pet brand. It felt native to the conversation, not opportunistic.

Every community, whether it is Swifties, gamers, sneakerheads, or K-pop stans, operates on a shared value system. Those values are expressed through insider codes like slang, symbols, references, and rituals. To an outsider, they may seem like surface details. To the people inside, they are signals of belonging.

Without that bridge, you are just changing colors. With it, you are building a relationship.

Where brands actually compete

This is where most trend-jumping efforts fall short. They start with “what’s popular” instead of “where do we have an authentic right to be?”

At Suasiv, we call the answer to that question your Cultural Arenas™ — the cultural spaces where your brand’s values naturally overlap with the values of a community.

When you operate from the perspective of your Arenas, you can look at a cultural wave and instantly know whether it is worth joining, how to join it, and what to contribute so it lasts beyond the spike.

That Petco post? In our language, that is a brand entering a moment through one of its Arenas. The connection was already there. The reference just lit it up.

How to move from relevance to resonance

Here is the pattern the most effective brands follow.

Start in your space. If your values align with the community’s values, you are already speaking the same language.

Find the bridge. It could be a character, ritual, inside joke, or shared reference that connects your brand world to theirs.

Contribute something of value. That might be entertainment, a useful tool, a wink only insiders catch — but it has to feel like it is for them, not just for the algorithm.

We saw it during “Barbenheimer” when certain brands leaned into aesthetics and storytelling they already owned. And we see it in gaming culture, where brands fluent in its rituals are embraced while outsiders feel like they are crashing the party.

Measuring what matters

Most brands guess. We do not.

Our R² Index™ shows where you stand in your market, your category, and your Arena. Our cultural momentum tracking shows how each post affects your resonance over time. You can see which moments give you fleeting attention and which build cultural equity that lasts.

We do the mapping and bridge-building so you can move into cultural moments with intent and authority, not hope and luck.

The real opportunity in the orange wave

It is not wrong to join a trend. But without a clear Arena, your contribution risks blending into the scroll.

With one, you stop chasing moments and start owning them. You know exactly where you belong, how to speak the language, and how to leave an impression that lasts long after the feed moves on.

That is the difference between turning orange for a day and being remembered for years.