By The Trend Skeptic · June 21, 2025
Introduction
You see it on LinkedIn. A competitor just released a video using that cool, fast-paced, text-on-screen style that’s everywhere right now. It gets a ton of likes. Your immediate reaction is, “We need one of those.” You task your team with creating a similar video, adopting the style as your own. The common practice is to treat video styles like fashionable clothes, trying on whatever is popular to make your brand look current. My argument is that a video style without a core story is just a costume on a corpse. It might look interesting for a moment, but it’s lifeless and will start to stink up your brand reputation.
The Current State of Things
The B2B marketing landscape is highly mimetic. When a new video style or trend emerges and appears successful, it is rapidly copied by others. We saw it with whiteboard animations, then with “epic” drone footage set to dramatic music, and more recently with the short-form, caption-heavy style popularized on TikTok and Instagram Reels. The prevailing wisdom is that adopting these trends is a shortcut to relevance. It’s a way to signal that your brand is modern and “gets it.”
The Immediate Risk
The most immediate risk is looking like a cheap imitation and confusing your audience. A very conservative, century-old financial institution saw that fast-paced, meme-filled videos were trending. They created one to promote their wealth management services. The result was a jarring and bizarre piece of content that was completely disconnected from their established brand identity of stability and trust. Their existing clients were bewildered, and the younger audience they were trying to attract saw it as a desperate, “How do you do, fellow kids?” moment.
The Problem Is You’re Mistaking a Tactic for a Strategy
A video style is a tactic. A story is a strategy. Chasing trendy styles is a sign that you have no story of your own to tell. You are borrowing visual interest in the hopes that no one notices you have nothing to say. A truly compelling story is timeless. It connects with a fundamental human emotion or solves a deep-seated customer problem. A visual trend, by its very nature, is fleeting. A brand built on a strong narrative can adopt or ignore trends as it sees fit. A brand with no narrative is a slave to them, constantly changing its clothes to stay relevant because it has no underlying character.
The Problem Deepens When the Trend Dies
The financial institution’s trendy video became dated almost overnight. Six months after it was released, the visual style they had copied already felt tired and overused. The video, which was expensive to produce, was now a liability—an embarrassing timestamp of when they tried and failed to be cool. This is the inevitable fate of any marketing asset built on a trend. A video built on a timeless customer story, however, can remain relevant for years. Think of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign. The visual style is from the 90s, but the core story is so powerful that it still resonates today.
The Far-Reaching Implications Are a Destructive Cycle of Cynicism
This relentless trend-chasing creates a deeply cynical audience. Viewers become conditioned to see marketing as a series of shallow, repetitive gimmicks. It erodes their ability to trust any brand’s communication, as it all feels like a temporary performance. This makes the job of the genuine marketer—the one with a real story to tell—exponentially harder. They have to break through not just the noise, but a thick wall of cynicism built by years of trend-chasing, story-less content.
The Counterintuitive Solution Is to Develop Your Own Signature Style
Instead of copying others, the solution is to work with a creative partner to develop a signature visual style that is born directly from your unique brand story. A company like Appture Digital doesn’t just offer a menu of trendy styles. Their talent lies in their ability to understand your brand’s DNA and translate it into a unique cinematic language. Maybe your brand story is about precision and detail, which calls for a clean, minimalist visual style. Maybe your story is about disruption and energy, which calls for a more dynamic, handheld approach. The style serves the story, not the other way around. This creates a consistent and recognizable brand presence that builds equity over time.
But We Have to Stay Current to Attract a Younger Audience
This is a critical misunderstanding of what younger audiences value. They don’t value brands that copy trends; they value brands that are authentic. Authenticity comes from a clear and consistent story. A brand that knows who it is and communicates that confidently—even if the style isn’t the flavor of the month—is far more appealing than a brand that is transparently trying too hard to fit in. Your signature style, born from your story, is the most authentic thing you can create.
Final Thoughts
Stop looking at your competitors’ videos for inspiration. Look inside your own company. Uncover the one true story that makes you unique, and then build a visual world around it. A trend is a borrowed costume that will soon be out of fashion. Your story is the character beneath, and it’s the only thing an audience will ever truly connect with. What is the one visual style that truly represents your story?
