Every year the market produces a new list of must-follow trends.
And so, every year some companies follow them without understanding them.
Every year, the numbers ultimately fail to add up.
Consumers and brands need to be fully aware of how marketing works: whether to avoid falling into cognitive biases, or to avoid governance errors in their own products and strategies.
For this reason, we at Bliss have mapped the mechanisms through which brands have deceived themselves, and deceived the market, by adopting narratives that seemed mandatory but turned out to be traps.
Every case has a pattern. And patterns, as we know, repeat themselves.
That is why only those able to recognise them in advance can avoid ending up on this list.
01) Greenwashing
In the years following COP21, sustainability became the most widespread claim in global marketing. Every brand wanted to be green. Very few were willing to change their business model to actually become so.
The mechanism was always the same. Declaring environmental values without changing operations. Communicating future commitments without reporting on present ones. Using terms such as “carbon neutral”, “eco-friendly”, “sustainable” without a verifiable definition of what they meant.
In 2025 European regulators stopped sending warning letters. In April, the German prosecutor fined DWS €25 million for claiming ESG leadership without supporting evidence. In July, the Italian Competition Authority fined SHEIN €1 million for vague and misleading environmental messaging on its evoluSHEIN line. In France, SHEIN itself received a €40 million penalty for deceptive commercial practices. A Paris court ordered TotalEnergies to pay €10,000 a day until it stopped describing its products as “carbon neutral”.
The lesson
Sustainability is an operational transformation. Those who treat it as communication without doing the former are not building a positioning. They are accumulating legal and reputational debt that will sooner or later be called in.
02) Purpose Washing
Between 2018 and 2022, purpose marketing became the industry’s religion. Every brand had to have a mission. Every communications initiative had to change the world. The idea was that consumers would choose the companies whose values were most aligned with their own.
The idea was not wrong. The execution almost always was.
The problem, in fact, was doing so without that stance being rooted in the company’s history, product and actual behaviour. When a brand adopts a cause as a marketing strategy without embedding it in its own identity, the public senses it. Not always consciously, but it senses it.
The Bud Light case (already mentioned in this article of ours) is the best documented. In 2023, the partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney triggered a boycott that caused America’s number one beer to lose 30% of its sales year-over-year. Anheuser-Busch laid off 380 employees and sold eight brands from its portfolio, and Bud Light lost its position as the best-selling beer in the United States. The damage was caused by the inconsistency between that stance and everything Bud Light had always represented to its audience.
In 2023 the CEO of Unilever admitted that “the debate around brands, sustainability and purpose has generated more heat than light”. This was the same company that had launched Dove Real Beauty in 2004, one of the first successful examples of purpose marketing. The difference between the two cases lies entirely in coherence: Dove was building an identity the brand had been pursuing for years. Bud Light adopted a position external to its own narrative without preparing to sustain it.
The lesson
Having a purpose works when that purpose is your purpose. Adopting it as an external declaration with no grounding in identity creates a double risk: a boycott from those who do not share the cause, and a loss of credibility with those who share it but do not believe you.
03) Metaverse and Web3 Washing
Between 2021 and 2022, the metaverse was inevitable. Meta was investing billions in it. Nike acquired RTFKT to bring its trainers into the digital world. Gucci was selling virtual handbags. Dozens of brands were launching NFTs as if they were the new loyalty programme.
The mechanism was clear. Stake out territory perceived as the future before anyone else, reach a young audience, build digital credibility.
Web3 funding collapsed by 74% between 2022 and 2023, from $26.6 billion to less than $7 billion. 90% of Web3 projects failed despite 112 billion in total investment. Decentraland, the leading metaverse platform, had 38 daily active users in 2023. Meta lost $10 billion in Reality Labs in 2022 alone before quietly shifting its message from the metaverse to AI. Disney shut down its metaverse division. Microsoft disbanded its industrial metaverse team.
Shiseido shut down all of its Web3 and metaverse projects in 2024 after reporting an 8% fall in net sales and a drop in operating profit of almost $70 million. It had partnerships with Decentraland, NFTs for Clé de Peau Beauté and digital collections for NARS. All quietly abandoned.
The lesson
Technological FOMO is one of the costliest biases in marketing. Jumping on a trend because “you have to be there”, without understanding how that trend connects to your positioning, produces investments with no return and embarrassing retreats. Within twelve months the market corrected what had seemed inevitable.
04) AI Washing
With the public explosion of AI between 2022 and 2024, claiming to use artificial intelligence became the fastest way to appear relevant. Start-ups that were simple automation software rebranded themselves as “AI-powered”. Listed companies inserted “AI” into every press release and SEC filing without the term corresponding to any verifiable operational reality.
In March 2024 the SEC brought its first enforcement actions on AI washing, simultaneously sanctioning Delphia and Global Predictions for false statements about the use of AI in their decision-making processes. Both had promoted AI capabilities that did not exist. In January 2025 came the first action against a public company: Presto Automation, listed on Nasdaq, accused of marketing as an automated AI solution a system that in fact required significant human intervention. In June 2025 Apple shareholders filed a class action claiming the company had promoted AI features for Siri without having any working prototype at the time of the announcement, causing the share price to fall by almost 25%.
The SEC has created a dedicated unit, the Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies Unit, with an explicit mandate to identify and prosecute AI washing as an immediate priority.
The lesson
AI washing is the greenwashing of the next decade. It follows the same pattern: a theme perceived as unavoidable, companies adopting it as a claim before it becomes a competence, regulators stepping in when the gap between statement and reality becomes untenable. Anyone claiming AI capabilities must be ready to prove them.
The pattern behind it all
Greenwashing, purpose washing, metaverse washing, AI washing. Different names, identical mechanism.
A brand adopts an external narrative, a trend, a cause, a technology, because the market seems to demand it. It does so without checking whether that narrative is consistent with what the brand truly is. It does so without building the operational structures to support it. It does so because the pressure of the moment seems more urgent than the identity-building work it would require.
The outcome is always the same: a promise the brand cannot keep, sooner or later exposed to the test of reality.
The cause is always the absence of governance. The lack of a system that defines what a brand can say consistently with what it is, and what it cannot afford to claim without being able to prove it.
A brand with solid governance evaluates trends. It decides which ones are compatible with its identity. It joins those to which it can make a genuine contribution. It ignores the rest, even when they seem unavoidable.
That ability to say no to the wrong trends is, paradoxically, one of the most precise indicators of a brand’s strength.
New Connections (FAQ)
How do you tell genuine adoption of a trend from washing?
With one precise question: can the brand demonstrate operationally what it claims? Authentic sustainability comes with verifiable reporting. Authentic purpose is embedded in decision-making processes, not just in external communications. Authentic AI can be documented in its concrete applications. When the answer to that question takes more than a slide, the brand is on solid ground. When it takes more than a press release, the risk of washing is already there.
Is there a way out of a washing case without destroying the brand?
Yes, but it requires the right sequence. First you change the operational reality, then you communicate the change. Reversing the order, communicating first and transforming later, is the mechanism that produced the cases documented in this guide. The public can tell the difference between a brand that admits a gap and works to close it, and a brand that replaces one unfounded claim with another. The first regains credibility over time. The second piles a second reputational debt on top of the first.
How can a brand tell whether a trend is compatible with its identity?
By asking three questions before any decision. First: is this trend consistent with what the brand has always represented, or does it require a change of positioning? Second: can the brand operationally support the narrative it would adopt? Third: three years from now, will this choice strengthen or weaken the direction the brand wants to build? If the answers to all three questions are aligned, the trend is compatible. If even one is negative or uncertain, the risk of washing is already there.