2025 marked a year of shifting values as AI acceleration and digital saturation became culturally mainstream. Looking ahead to 2026, these shifts are beginning to crystallise, as consumers become more selective about what they engage with, prioritising function, participation, and cultural meaning over deference to the purely digital. At Sign Salad, we focus on tracking these emerging attitudes and behaviours to help brands strategise with culturally-informed intention and prepare for what’s coming next. Here are a few nascent cultural shifts we believe will move from the emergent margins to the dominant mainstream over the course of the coming year and beyond.

Redefining Snacking

As wellness culture continues to dominate everyday consumption, snacking is being redefined through nutrition and density, with 59% of global consumers interested in products customised to meet their nutritional needs (ADM, 2025). While TikTok’s Girl Dinner trend popularised playful, customisable snack plates, 2026 will see this concept evolve to prioritise function. Driven by GLP-1-influenced portioning and rising ingredient awareness, everyday eating is becoming smaller, smarter, and designed to deliver maximum nutritional benefit, with brands like M&S already translating this shift into new, nutrient-dense ranges. Nutritional pillars like protein and fibre will continue to dominate, as ‘hero’ ingredients like collagen will also see a big boost. As function comes to dominate snacking, there will be new opportunities for brands to cater to consumers looking to make every bite count.

Marks & Spencer’s new Nutrient Dense range

New Travel Priorities

Travel priorities are shifting as tourists of all ages increasingly organise holidays around wellbeing and function. Sober tourism is entering the mainstream, as even young audiences adopt the trend with 77% of US Gen Z choosing drink-free holidays (StudentUniverse, 2024). Youth travel brand Contiki has launched its first sober curious tour, replacing pub crawls with evening walking tours, at prices comparable to traditional itineraries. At the same time, awareness of sleep’s impact on health is driving the rise of sleep tourism. From hotels like Yotel using colour research to create environments that cue calm, to premium brands like Equinox employing biometric sleep technology, rest is being actively sought and engineered. Together, these shifts signal a recalibration of travel’s role and value, where trips are restorative by design.

Yotel, Glasgow

Multimodal Living

Living arrangements are entering a new age of experimentation as economic pressures, demographic change, and shifting life stages dismantle the dominance of the nuclear household. From friendship groups pooling resources to buy property, to older adult children returning to the family home, to communal coparenting facilities, people are increasingly mixing ages, roles, and responsibilities. Meanwhile, purpose-built intergenerational developments like the planned Phoenix Project in Lewes, Sussex, are designed to facilitate mutual support between residents, with community and emotional care built into its model. Rather than one dominant structure, 2026 will see the proliferation of living formats, adapting to emerging logistical and emotional needs. For brands, this signals the need to move beyond one-size-fits-all messaging and products, instead designing for shared households, hybrid lifestyles, and emerging functional, social, and emotional needs.

The Phoenix Project, Lewes

Brands Embrace ‘Post-Advertising’ Playful Meta Marketing

As ad-fatigue grows, brands are turning to creative, playful tactics to cut through the noise and become part of culture itself, as marketing moves beyond traditional ads to blur the lines between reality and advertising. From Lumon Industries’s LinkedIn profile promoting TV show Severance, to Epidemic Sound’s guerilla ads on NYC trash bags that pay homage to the city, or The Ordinary’s “ordinarily priced” eggs (at $3.37 a pack, the cheapest in NYC), brands are embedding themselves into our lives in unexpected, meta ways. By fully ‘committing to the bit’, brands are awarding audiences’ attention in an age of distraction, and giving fleeting moments longer-lasting cultural relevance.

Lumon Industries LinkedIn Profile

Co-Creating Culture

Seeking social media virality is nothing new, but in 2026 the hierarchy of cultural authority is becoming more distributed. Cultural influence now flows across a wider ecosystem, as younger audiences spend increasing amounts of time on social and creator-led platforms alongside traditional broadcast channels. As digital media’s influence continues to solidify, brands are shifting from directing culture to co-creating it. Brands are authoring alongside online creators, legitimising ideas, jokes, and hacks that originated spontaneously. McDonald’s recent Secret Menu formalises many fan-created items like the Surf ‘n’ Turf which combines a fish fillet and beef burger. In a recent campaign, Vaseline has tested viral skincare hacks with experts, and Anthropologie has turned a prank TikTok into an IRL store activation jokingly selling rocks. By co-creating online discourse and prioritising participation, rather than simply chasing virality, brands can gain credibility and cultural relevance.

Luxury via Literature

In 2026, we will see books and reading emerging as its own form of cultural capital, signalling depth, effort, and reflection. It is the National Year of Reading in the UK as governments and educational institutions aim to elevate the virtue and value of original literacy (now that digital literacy has been successfully embedded). Amid seemingly endless claims of digital ‘brainrot’, the act of reading itself has become a status symbol, demonstrating the cultivation of taste beyond the algorithm. This shift is echoed in the rise of Substack as a prestige platform for writers, creators, and brands, where the appeal lies in curated, longform content that centres individual perspectives. Participation is key here, with celebrities from Dakota Johnson to Reese Witherspoon running their own book clubs, to luxury brands like Le Monde Béryl hosting candelit readings. Viral literary Instagram accounts like @sendb00ks (22k followers) now extend into lifestyle ecosystems, selling merch and collabing with artists, reframing reading as a socially expressive form of indulgence and a way of communicating a ‘premium’ lifestyle.

credit: @sendb00ks x Le Monde Béryl


3 Key Takeaways for Brands

  1. Function First: From snacking to travel, function is the dominant driver of choice in 2026. Consumers are seeking tangible benefits for increasingly hybrid needs and lifestyles, creating opportunity for brands to turn utility into a core value.

  2. Savvy Participation: As marketing moves from ‘above, below, and through the line advertising’ to embedded co-creation, how can brands turn spontaneous moments into cultural impact?

  3. Cultivating Capital: Knowledge, taste, and curated experiences are becoming social currency, creating opportunity for brands to offer culturally expressive experiences that extend beyond product itself.
Key Trends for 2026: from the emergent margins to the dominant mainstream