10 Marketing & Storytelling Trends That Shaped Culture and Growth in 2025
With every year, marketing becomes bolder and more creative, pushing the limits on what’s possible.
Across hundreds of stories featured in The Marketer’s Storybook newsletter, a clear pattern emerged: the brands that won didn’t just dazzle us with innovative campaigns and creative, they told better stories. Stories rooted in culture. Stories shaped by creators. Stories designed as systems, not stunts.
This wasn’t the year of perfect messaging. It was the year of narrative fluency.
Below are the 10 storytelling-driven marketing themes that defined the year, pulled directly from the campaigns, crises, experiments, and cultural moments covered week after week, plus what they mean for marketers heading into 2026.
Let’s drive in!
1. Culture Wrote the Stories – And Brands Joined In
Some of the most powerful brand moments this year were not scripted. Instead, brands turned to trending topics, creators and customers for inspiration. Whether it’s a customer reframing a product as a ritual, niche subcultures turned viral trend by creators, or an event in the world that got everyone talking, the comment section became a creative brief.
One of the clearest examples of culture authoring the story came from Diet Coke’s accidental viral moment of being called the “fridge cigarette.” Coined by a TikTok creator with a small following, the phrase reframed a cold Diet Coke as a low-stakes emotional ritual – a mid-day pause, a tiny reward, an identity signal. Coca-Cola didn’t engineer the moment. It didn’t jump in awkwardly. It simply benefited from years of brand equity while culture did the storytelling for them.
Storytelling shift: Brands moved from story creators to story participants.
What this means for marketers: Your most valuable storytelling insight probably isn’t in a deck, it’s in UGC, comments, duets, stitches, Reddit threads, or offhand phrases customers use to describe how your product fits into their lives.
2. Great Brands Built Story Engines, Not One-Off Campaigns
The standout brands covered in The Marketer’s Storybook weren’t chasing virality, they were building repeatable narrative worlds. From episodic creator series, to running jokes, and recurring formats, brands embraced platforms that allowed stories to stack, evolve, and even compound.
An example of this comes from Uber Eats’ ongoing “food conspiracy” storyline, which featured rotating celebrities and absurd plotlines. It worked because Uber Eats built a recurring narrative universe where audiences understood the premise and anticipated the next chapter. Each execution reinforces the same core idea while staying fresh.
Storytelling shift: From campaigns to story systems.
What this means for marketers: Storytelling scales when the premise stays stable but the execution evolves. If your audience can describe your campaign format before you launch the next one, you’re building a story engine, not just content.
3. Creators Became the Storytellers Brands Borrowed Credibility From
Creators didn’t just distribute stories, they legitimized them.
Across both B2B and B2C industries, the most trusted brand stories were told through real people, not polished brand voices. Increasingly, creators were given more freedom to tell stories personalized to what resonates with their audiences – versus just following the brand brief and key messages.
Dove’s #ShareTheFirst campaign marked a major shift: creators weren’t amplifying a finished idea — they were the idea. From concept to execution, creators shaped the stories, the tone, and the emotional truth. The result felt intimate, fast, and culturally fluent because it was authored by real people, not polished scripts.
Storytelling shift: From “influencer amplification” to co-authorship.
What this means for marketers: Credibility can’t be briefed. When creators co-create, storytelling gains emotional permission. Your role shifts from director to the editor setting guardrails, not controlling the voice.
4. Weird Worked When It Told a Clear Story
This year, a crop of brands emerged with a distinctly “weird” strategy. It was as if the social media lead had transported us to a parallel universe filled with surreal visuals, absurd humor, and even intentionally chaotic social content. But here’s the thing, this “weird” strategy wasn’t random, it was distinctive storytelling.
The brands that leaned into oddity weren’t confusing audiences. They were signaling personality, confidence, and self-awareness. However, it’s important to note that weird works when it’s repeatable. If audiences can spot your brand without a logo, your storytelling has character that survives the feed.
An example of this is Nutter Butter’s unhinged social content. The brand shares everything from talking cookies to bizarre visual gags. While the content looks chaotic on the surface, underneath is a consistent brand story of playful rebellion, internet fluency, and audience participation. The weirdness isn’t random; it’s recognizable.
Storytelling shift: From explaining to entertaining.
What this means for marketers: If your story sounds like it could belong to five competitors, it won’t survive the feed. Clarity matters but character and repeatability is what makes stories memorable.
5. Nostalgia Became Narrative, Not Decoration
Nostalgia was everywhere in 2025. However, the best examples didn’t simply replay the past. Instead, they rewrote it for today, using heritage as emotional shorthand while updating tone, casting, and context.
One example of this in 2025 was the 25th anniversary campaign for Lancôme Juicy Tubes. In the campaign, Lancôme didn’t simply relaunch a product, it reactivated a cultural memory. The brand partnered with early-2000s icons including Paris Hilton, Hilary Duff, Mischa Barton, and Ed Westwick, weaving them into a social-first rollout across TikTok and Instagram. Each celebrity shared personal Juicy Tubes moments, layered with unmistakable references to Gossip Girl, The OC, and more. The campaign rolled out as a deliberate drip of content with reveals, memes, fan reactions, and creator commentary, making it feel less like a throwback ad and more like a pop culture reunion unfolding in real time.
Storytelling shift: From throwback to translation.
What this means for marketers: Your archive isn’t just content, it’s story equity. Nostalgia works best when it’s specific, emotionally anchored, and told by the people who lived it in a way that feels native, intentional, and culturally fluent now.
6. AI Accelerated Storytelling and Raised the Stakes
AI powered faster content creation, smarter targeting, and new discovery paths, but it also introduced backlash, mistrust, and legal gray areas. The strongest brands didn’t sell AI as magic. They framed it as assistive, human-guided, and values-led.
2025 also ushered in the debate of AI replacing jobs. I was fortunate to steal a few minutes with Demis Hassabis at SXSW London and we both believe that AI won’t replace the storytellers. Instead, AI will amplify our role as storytellers, giving us new opportunities for brainstorming, creating, and learning new techniques.
What also stuck with me was his belief that great storytelling will be critical in shaping how the world understands and adopts AI. Our stories will frame the possibilities – and the guardrails.
Duolingo learned this lesson the hard way that how you talk about AI can matter more than how you use it. When the company’s CEO publicly suggested that AI could replace contractors and potentially educators, the backlash was immediate. Ironically, it played out most loudly on Duolingo’s own TikTok, a platform where the brand had built deep goodwill through humor, humanity, and its beloved owl mascot. What followed was a rapid narrative pivot: a thoughtful LinkedIn post from CEO Luis von Ahn clarifying his comments, reaffirming the role of humans, and reframing AI as a tool to support — not replace — creativity and learning.
Storytelling shift: From novelty to responsibility.
What this means for marketers: How you talk about AI matters as much as how you use it. Brands must proactively define their AI narrative before the internet does it for them. Transparency, humility, and a human-first point of view aren’t optional when introducing AI into your story — they’re the difference between innovation and erosion of trust.
7. The Feed Became the Narrative Arc
Discovery, consideration, entertainment, and purchase didn’t just compress this year, they collapsed into a single scroll. Brand stories no longer unfolded across channels or nudged audiences toward a destination. They had to resolve where they started: inside the feed. If the story didn’t make sense, create desire, and offer a next step in seconds, it didn’t survive.
Cheetos’ Shape Hunt Madness is a perfect example of this shift in action. Instead of telling a traditional campaign story with awareness first, engagement later, and conversion somewhere else, Cheetos designed the entire narrative to live natively on TikTok. The premise was instantly understandable: find weirdly shaped Cheetos, submit them, and you could win $10,000. The absurd hero video featuring a therapy session, Rorschach blots, and Chester Cheetah as the enabler delivered the joke and the mechanic in one beat. Creator content showed participation. TikTok Shop made buying Cheetos part of the story, not a separate step. The feed wasn’t just where the campaign showed up, it was the campaign.
Storytelling shift: From funnel-based storytelling to moment-based storytelling.
What this means for marketers: Modern brand stories must work in fragments without feeling fragmented. Each post needs to deliver a complete narrative beat with a beginning (what is this?), a middle (why should I care?), and an end (what can I do right now?), while still reinforcing a larger story over time. If your storytelling requires people to leave the feed to “understand the idea,” you’re designing for an audience behavior that no longer exists.
8. IRL Experiences Returned — But as Story Fuel
Physical brand experiences came back this year, but not as destination spectacles. The most effective IRL moments were designed as story catalysts and built to be seen, photographed, shared, and retold far beyond the physical space. In other words, the experience wasn’t the end goal. The story it generated was.
Chelsea in Bloom 2025 is a standout example. Across London’s Chelsea neighborhood, brands transformed storefronts and streets into large-scale floral installations, but the smartest activations went far beyond decoration. Penhaligon’s partnered with Highgrove to root a fragrance launch in royal gardens and heritage storytelling. Ralph Lauren created a Hamptons-inspired charity flower shop that fused lifestyle aspiration with purpose. PizzaExpress celebrated its 60th anniversary with a nostalgic fashion show built entirely for visual capture. Each activation told a complete brand story at a glance and crucially, one that translated instantly to social feeds.
Storytelling shift: From experience to proof.
What this means for marketers: If an in-person activation can’t be explained in one sentence or captured in one frame, it won’t travel. Design physical experiences with a clear narrative hook and social afterlife baked in.
9. Crisis Storytelling Became a Core Skill
In 2025, crises didn’t unfold quietly or on a single channel. They detonated in real time across social media, group chats, news cycles, and comment sections, often before brands had even drafted a statement. The brands that survived didn’t just manage the fallout; they seized narrative control early enough to stop the story from being written for them.
Astronomer’s handling of its executive scandal is one of the clearest examples – although I think they were a bit slow to respond. After footage surfaced of two married executives engaging in an affair at a Coldplay concert, the B2B data company was suddenly the subject of viral attention — a scenario few enterprise brands are prepared for. Rather than issuing a generic apology and going dark, Astronomer released a sharp, self-aware video starring Gwyneth Paltrow. The response was polarizing, but effective: the campaign froze the media frenzy, reframed the conversation, and shifted attention back toward the business itself.
Storytelling shift: From defense to narrative control.
What this means for marketers: Crisis isn’t just a comms issue, it’s a storytelling test. Speed, tone, and clarity now determine whether a moment destroys trust or strengthens it.
10. Brand Storytelling Reclaimed Business Value
For years, brand storytelling was treated as a “nice to have,” in the sense that it was important for awareness and sentiment, but difficult to connect to hard outcomes. In 2025, that excuse finally collapsed. Data and behavior aligned to make one thing clear: brand is not the opposite of performance. It is a performance driver.
Kantar’s latest BrandZ report put numbers behind what great marketers have long argued: brand now accounts for roughly one-third of total company value. Brands with strong emotional connection, cultural relevance, and distinctiveness consistently outperformed the market, not just in recall, but in pricing power, resilience during downturns, and long-term growth. This wasn’t about logos or taglines. It was about narrative consistency and trust built over time.
Poppi’s rise to a near $2B valuation made that truth tangible. The prebiotic soda brand didn’t win by outspending incumbents or dominating shelf space. It won by building a story people wanted to belong to. Poppi led with content, creator partnerships, and community-first storytelling long before scale arrived. TikTok wasn’t just a channel, it was the engine. With billions of organic views, a distinct tone, and relentless cultural participation, Poppi turned storytelling into demand, demand into distribution leverage, and distribution into valuation. This wasn’t brand as fluff. This was brand as growth infrastructure.
Storytelling shift: From brand as a soft metric to a measurable growth asset.
What this means for marketers: The marketers who win next will be the ones who can connect story to sales, culture to conversion, and narrative to long-term enterprise value. If you can’t show how your storytelling drives pricing power, loyalty, and momentum, someone else will reduce it to a cost line. But if you can, brand becomes one of the most defensible investments on the balance sheet.
What This Year Really Taught Us About Storytelling
Across every edition of The Marketer’s Storybook, one truth became impossible to ignore: the brands that won weren’t the ones trying to control the story, they were the ones building systems that let stories travel.
This year exposed the limits of traditional brand storytelling. Carefully crafted messages, rigid brand books, and one-off “big idea” campaigns struggled to keep pace with culture, platforms, and audiences that move in real time. In their place, a new model emerged — one defined by narrative fluency rather than narrative control.
The strongest brands didn’t just tell stories. They:
- Listened closely to how customers reframed their products
- Designed formats that could evolve, repeat, and compound
- Trusted creators to bring emotional credibility
- Embraced weirdness, nostalgia, and humor when it reinforced identity
- Treated AI, crises, and IRL moments as narrative decisions, not just operational ones
- Proved that storytelling could drive real business outcomes
What tied all ten themes together wasn’t creativity for creativity’s sake. It was intentional storytelling architecture and stories designed to move across feeds, communities, and moments, while staying rooted in a clear brand truth.
This wasn’t the year of perfect messaging. It was the year of stories that could survive the scroll, the comment section, the backlash, and the balance sheet.
Final Thought
This year didn’t reward the most polished brand stories. It rewarded living ones, the stories shaped by culture, told by communities, and reinforced at every customer touchpoint.
If your storytelling still lives primarily in a brand book, a campaign deck, or a quarterly plan, it’s already falling behind reality.
The future belongs to brands that build stories people can step into, remix, and carry forward — not just listen to.
Here’s to telling more of the stories that matter in 2026 and beyond.
Want to Become a Better Storyteller in 2026?
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Books:
- The Power of Visual Storytelling: Learn how to shape a visual story around your brand using images, videos, GIFs, infographics, and more. Get your copy here.
- The Laws of Brand Storytelling: The definitive guide to using storytelling to win over customers’ hearts, minds, and loyalty. Grab it here.
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Jessica Gioglio is the co-author of The Laws of Brand Storytelling and The Power of Visual Storytelling. Professionally, Jessica has led innovative marketing and public relations programs for Dunkin’, TripAdvisor, Sprinklr, and more. Today, Jessica is a keynote speaker (book her here) and founder of With Savvy Media & Marketing, a strategic branding, storytelling, and content strategy consultancy.