Trend-Jacking

Riding a trend can earn reach a brand could never buy — or get it dragged. The difference is discipline. Trend-jacking works only when a trend is a fit, safe to touch, and still rising, and most brand failures come from skipping one of those checks: forcing an irrelevant trend, touching a sensitive moment, or arriving late.

So this skill is mostly judgment. Before anything gets made, a trend runs three gates:

1. FIT — can you add a genuine angle, or are you just slapping your logo on someone's moment?
2. SAFETY — would a brand inserting itself here look opportunistic, tone-deaf, or exploitative?
3. TIMING — is the trend still on the way up, or already saturated?

Any single fail = don't do it. Fit and safety are checked before timing — a fast post on an unfit or unsafe trend is just a fast mistake. (Full framework: references/the-three-gates.md.)