Curion President Keren Novack’s first piece for the Forbes Business Council asks how CPG brands can tell a trend that fades from one that realistically changes how people buy.
Walk any grocery aisle and the shelves are stacked with trend bets. Organic. Plant-based. GLP-1-friendly. Clean label. Every one of them is positioned as the future, and yet only some of them really are. Knowing the difference, before the marketing budget is spent, is one of the hardest calls a CPG brand has to make.
That’s the question Curion President Keren Novack takes on in her first piece as a member of the Forbes Business Council.
"A fad has an audience. A movement has a lived experience.
A fad pulls people in once but a movement gets them to come back. The gap between those two outcomes shows up later in how people behave once the hype fades.
Novack points to plant-based meat as the cautionary tale. The category had every early signal of a real movement like premium shelf space, fast-food test runs, and billions in venture funding behind it. Then sales kept falling, year after year, as shoppers tried the product once, decided it didn’t deliver on taste or value, and didn’t come back for a second.
Her advice for brands chasing the next wave is blunt: stop chasing the idea and chase the consumer instead.
Brands that wait for a trend to go culturally loud before reacting are usually already behind. By the time the product hits shelf, the conversation has moved on. The harder work is knowing which shifts will actually change behavior, not just the conversation.