Internet slang and food brands: Key takeaways
- Consumers often view brand slang as inauthentic, particularly when it clashes with the personality they already associate with the company.
- Slang is more likely to land when it fits an established brand voice or comes naturally through a creator rather than a corporate account.
- Brands can participate in online culture through products, collaborations and visual humor without borrowing every viral phrase.
When Mondelēz-owned Oreo and Coca-Cola launched a joint campaign in August 2024 declaring themselves ‘besties’, not everyone was charmed. In a small poll of 92 Gen Z respondents conducted by youth-marketing platform dcdx, 85% described brands using the word ‘bestie’ as cringe. The finding was hardly definitive – and didn’t measure reaction to the Oreo-Coca-Cola collaboration specifically – but it captured a much bigger problem: an industry increasingly addicted to internet slang as a shortcut to relevance.
The Besties campaign itself was no flop by conventional marketing measures. According to Sensor Tower, it generated roughly 75 million impressions through eight retailer-run advertising networks, including those operated by Walmart, Walgreens and Meijer, using TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and display ads. Walmart’s network alone accounted for 69% of those impressions. But impressions and affection aren’t the same thing, and that’s where the real risk lies.
Snacks, baked treats, confectionery and beverages are impulse purchases that translate naturally into short-form video, making it easy to see why a brand might borrow the language of ‘rizz’ – charisma or social appeal – or ‘6-7’, a deliberately meaningless catchphrase popularised by younger social media users, and lean into the nonsensical humour commonly described as ‘brainrot’.
A 2025 study led by researchers at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business found that shoppers tend to view brand slang as inauthentic and at odds with how they expect companies to communicate, particularly when the language clashes with the brand’s established personality. The backlash wasn’t confined to older shoppers as younger consumers were similarly unimpressed.
“More often than not, the use of slang backfires on the brand and they lose credibility,” said lead author Bryce Pyrah, now assistant professor of Marketing at the University of Minnesota. Coauthor Ying Xie, now professor of Marketing at the University of Texas at Dallas, said the problem stems from the relationship implied by the language. “A brand does not have that social relationship with you. Consumers who are not familiar with the brand don’t engage with it as a friend.”
Slang works between people because it signals familiarity and belonging, but those associations can unravel when a company adopts the same language to sell something. Consumers may instead see the wording as a calculated attempt to manufacture a relationship.
There are, however, exceptions. The researchers found slang didn’t damage brands with an established ‘exciting’ personality, while the negative effect disappeared when the message came from an influencer. Slang works only when the speaker has earned the right to use it.
Why the chase for relevance never lets up
Social media moves language faster than any previous generation of marketers has had to manage. Oxford University Press named ‘brainrot’ its word of the year for 2024, while Dictionary.com selected ‘6-7’ for 2025, despite the phrase having no fixed meaning.
Chicago-based listening and analytics platform Sprout Social’s first Social Media Dictionary illustrates the scale and speed involved. Its analysis of English-language public posts across X, TikTok, Instagram and Reddit found that ‘aura’ generated almost 32 billion potential impressions and 2.3 million mentions between January and November 2025. The word first surged through ‘aura farming’, then reappeared months later as ‘aura-maxxing’ – the deliberate enhancement of someone’s image for online status.
That linguistic formula has spread directly into food culture. Fibremaxxing encourages consumers to increase fibre intake, sardinemaxxing turns canned fish into a nutritional flex and savoury-maxxing celebrates salty, pickled and umami-heavy foods over sweet treats. The suffix gives familiar behaviours novelty and online momentum but also shows how quickly a term can be stretched across unrelated trends until it loses its cultural specificity.
The most effective food brands respond to the cultural moment without making the borrowed language carry the entire campaign. North American plant-based brand Field Roast moved quickly on Charli XCX’s ‘brat summer’ in July 2024, using the album’s acid-green aesthetic to promote its bratwurst and tagging the singer directly. KFC UK took a similarly playful but largely slang-free route in March, building its Pickle Mania range around the wider appetite for briny foods and promoting it with a one-off puffer jacket filled with pickles and brine.
Both connected an online trend to something tangible about the product – a stronger proposition than adding a fashionable word to a conventional caption.
The pressure to appear relevant nevertheless remains intense. Sprout Social’s 2025 Index found that 93% of consumers believe it’s important for brands to keep up with online culture, but almost 60% would rather see original content than brands jumping on every trend. Consumers want evidence a company understands the culture around it, not proof its social team has seen the same meme.
How far can brands take it?
Brands that pull off slang rarely invent a personality for a single post. Disruptor US drinks brand Liquid Death can use abrasive, absurdist humour because it’s spent years presenting canned water as an anti-corporate lifestyle brand. At the brighter end of the spectrum, Poppi’s playful TikTok presence supports a consistent product story built around soda and gut health. In both cases, the language reinforces a recognisable identity rather than compensating for the lack of one.
A China-based study published in Frontiers in Psychology reached a related but more nuanced conclusion. Different styles of internet slang changed whether consumers viewed a fictional brand as sincere or competent but didn’t improve their overall attitude towards it. Slang, in other words, may influence the personality a brand projects without making consumers like it any more.
Customer engagement platform Iterable’s 2026 Customer Engagement Report, based on a survey of 1,084 consumers and 505 marketers, found that 64% of marketers considered their personalisation more about optics than impact. Although the finding extends beyond slang, it exposes the same weakness: communications can look tailored without creating a convincing connection.
The opposite approach is to borrow a term after it’s escaped its original community and reached the corporate approval chain. Sprout calls the early, targeted spread of content within niche groups ‘micro-virality’. Those communities build meaning and trust around a phrase before it reaches the mainstream, but they may already be moving on by the time brands have agreed how to use it.
Food and drink marketers therefore need cultural judgment, not simply faster sign-off. Teams should ask where a term originated, who currently uses it, whether it fits the product and how the post will read after the trend peaks. Junior employees and social specialists who participate in these communities should have a genuine voice in that decision, rather than being asked to translate a pre-approved campaign into Gen Z.
Working with creators offers another route, with the Tippie College study finding consumers were more forgiving when slang appeared in an influencer’s branded post than when it came directly from a company. A creator can speak naturally in the language of a community, allowing brands to join the conversation without forcing the same tone through their corporate accounts.
Culture can also be harnessed without slang, and a limited-edition flavour, creator recipe, live activation or visual joke may connect a brand to a viral moment more convincingly than any borrowed word.
However a brand chooses to participate, the same test applies: does the moment genuinely fit its identity or is it merely chasing attention? The brands that emerge with their credibility intact will be those with enough self-awareness to recognise which moments belong to them – and enough restraint to leave the rest alone.
The 5-point cringe test
Does it sound like the brand? If the wording bears no resemblance to the company’s established voice, one fashionable post is unlikely to make it convincing.
Do you understand where it came from? Marketers should know which community created or popularised a term, what it means in that context and whether its use carries any cultural baggage.
Is the brand already too late? A phrase may still be generating millions of impressions after the people who made it popular have stopped using it. Search volume isn’t the same as cultural currency.
Would a creator say it better? Pyrah and his coauthors found consumers were more accepting of slang in an influencer’s branded post than in a message from a corporate account.
Does the product earn the joke? Field Roast’s ‘brat summer’ campaign worked because the trend connected directly to its bratwurst. If the slang could be pasted onto any product, it probably adds little beyond borrowed attention.
Studies:
Pyrah B, Wang J, LiY and Xie Y. (2025). The Slang Paradox: Connecting or Disconnecting with Consumers? Journal of Marketing Research, 62(5), 776-795. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437251322453
Liu S, Wu Y and Gong W (2022) Measuring Internet Slang Style in the Marketing Context: Scale Development and Validation. Front. Psychol. 12:751806. https://doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.751806
