Talks

How Cozy Culture is Evolving.

Kim · Nov 19, 2024 ·

I followed my cosy research from last year by diving into some different areas of the mega-trend over the last three months of this year.

I’ve embedded the deck I shared as part of the webinar I gave with AI social trends platform NextAtlas and shared the link to a recording of the webinar, too.

In this research, I cover:

What cosy culture is
The key social platforms for cosy culture
How cosy fashion took over the world
Upcoming trends around the cosy home on Pinterest and Instagram
Cosy food, Gen Z’s love for soup and more
A deep dive into what the cosy lifestyle is
Why cosy gaming is having a moment.

And the link to watch the webinar: https://www.linkedin.com/video/live/urn:li:ugcPost:7262509833914839040

If you’d like to work with me or learn more about any of my social listening research, please get in touch!

Last week, I gave a webinar with the social listening tool ViralMoment about how Booktok is driving cultural change in a huge way.

You can read my slides from the event below, and watch the event here.

In this deck you’ll learn:

Just how massive booktok is in 2024
Key categories (newsflash, it’s romantasy heavy!)
How girls are redefining what it is to be ‘bookish’
Booktok as an unrivalled recommendation engine
Alternative book communities
Booktok and google search trends
The journey of a fashion trend from booktok to the mainstream
How booktok is shaping our homes
Booktok to the screen, the return of romance!

These slides are just the highlights from my research. I analysed over a million posts, so I’m releasing a deeper dive into Booktok in the next couple of weeks. If you want to get a copy of it, sign up to my substack!

The Rise and Rise of Cosy Culture

Kim · May 1, 2024 ·

This post is a deep dive into cosy culture, and a written version of my talk from the Si Lab Trends summit in April this year.

From adjective to lifestyle: The cosy convergence

I know that cosy is nothing new; it’s been a word we have used to describe a particular feeling for hundreds of years. In this post, I will look at the shift we’ve seen since the pandemic, from cosy as a descriptor to cosy as a lifestyle.

One of the things that I uncovered during this project was how many previously disparate themes now have an outwardly cosy element (largely thanks to social). I’m calling this the cosy convergence.

We’ll explore what it is, why it matters, how it’s manifesting on social media, and how you can use social listening insights to tap into it.

Between September 1st 2023 and April 1st 2024, across  Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Threads, and Reddit there were 63,095,396 mentions of cozy/ cosy which generated 1,859,322,923 engagements.

So how does cosy show up on various social channels?

Volume of Mentions Vs. Volume of Engagements by Kim Townend

The chart embedded above is interactive, so you can see the exact number of both mentions and engagements per platform.

First we’re looking at the volume of mentions, so how many posts we’re seeing around cosy on each platform.

Pinterest is the clear leader here, with forty-nine million thirty-six thousand six hundred twenty-four mentions, more than five times the amount of the closest competition. (it’s not uncommon for Pinterest to outperform other platforms, particularly if the topic being analysed is more traditionally female facing and lends itself to images)

But when we look at where the engagements are happening it’s an entirely different story. Although TikTok was only responsible for 969k mentions, it generated 1.8 billion engagements during our search. YouTube generated 60 million engagements. None of the other platforms even came close to these levels of engagement. This is a clear indication that video (and more particularly short form video) rules both social media and cosy culture.

Now that we know cosy culture is definitely a thing happening on social, we want to understand if it’s exclusive to social.

The first step in understanding whether a trend is bigger than just social is to see if it’s made the leap to search.

This chart shows the global search data around simply the word ‘cozy’ over the last  five years. The search trend is extremely seasonal, but it’s on a steady upward trajectory and the  forecast is positive.

Cool, so what is cosy culture exactly?

Cosy culture is strange because it’s fast culture (as defined by Grant McCracken) and it’s slow culture, and it’s heavily seasonal.

The slow culture part of it means it’s incredibly broad and accessible, the same way there’s a (tik)Tok for everything, there’s a cosy for everything.

These headlines are all signals from the last year on various cosy subtrends that journos are writing about, but alongside these flash-in-a-pan-are-they-even-really-trends, the social data also shows us a move towards longevity and a cultural shift inward. Fast cosy culture can be used in your social, but is best as resposive content that captures a fleeting moment.

These slow culture signals are the cosy themes that have longevity, those rooted in tradition over fad. They tap into bigger human behaviours and desires and, as such, are better suited to a longer-form social strategy.

How is cosy playing out on social?

Who is talking about cosy things?

With a subject as big as this, I don’t usually pay too much attention to demographics, as they become more valuable as we cluster the audience.
However, I ran the audience to see if anything stood out immediately. This is what I found.

The audience is very, very female.
It’s the female audience who are responsible for the seasonal aspect of the trend, the male conversation is reasonably consistent throughout the year.
The audience is truly global with a concentration in the US and the UK.
The audience skews heavily younger millennial.

To begin my analysis, I grouped my data into eight broad themes that I saw repeatedly recurring. These were fashion, home, which encompasses all things house-based, including interior design and soft furnishings, the aesthetic, books/reading,TV and movies, gaming, music, and food.

How the Cosy Themes Manifest on Different Social Platforms. by Kim Townend

When dealing with multiple social networks, I look at something other than the cumulative volume of the themes as one platform can dominate and skew the data. As we saw before, Pinterest is that platform in this search. To better understand this, I’ve examined how cosy manifests on different social networks.

When writing social strategy, this kind of data is invaluable in helping me figure out which platforms are the most important to which communities and where the brand or business I’m working with should focus its efforts.

As you can see, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube all have a very high percentage of home-based content, whereas Twitch and Reddit favour gaming more. This is immediately helpful to me in understanding where I should deep-dive on specific topics or where my brand should concentrate its ad spend.

Diving deeper I then look to understand two more things: which themes were more seasonal in nature/ which were more stable and secondly, how the overall engagement mapped against the themes.

The graph above shows the timeline and the associated themes, you’ll see that ‘home’ has the biggest seasonal drop-off, fashion, aesthetic, and food have smaller drops, and gaming, TV & movies, and music, remain consistent throughout the year.

This suggests that while the more significant themes are seasonal, they continue growing each year and introducing smaller trends into their canon. The consistency around TV, music and gaming shows that these smaller trends are becoming sub-genres in their own right.

When i mapped this against engagement three things became clear:

Level of engagement shows no correlation to volume of mentions. This has only really happened since the explosion of short-form video. When text/images were the default social content, engagement would usually follow a pretty similar line to mentions.
Most of the huge spikes of engagement are driven by just one piece of content.
Nine times out of ten that content is coming from either TikTok or YouTube

The Subgenres of Cosy

This blog post is already quite long, so I’m just going to do a top line look at the themes that were more consistent.

Books

The only search that over-indexed in the UK spelling of cosy. A big UK audience but also many Anglophiles
Twitter, TikTok and Reddit are key platforms for the cozy bookish, but early data shows threads is becoming a key contender in this space
Cozy crime, cozy fantasy, and cozy mysteries are becoming full-blown  sub-genres
Cozy reading nooks crossover into  the cozy home trend

Movies, TV, & Music

Although a smaller volume, cosy music is largely focused around seasonal lofi beats playlist videos, which are usually  hours long, so the engagement time is phenomenal. Cosy beats was popularised by the lofi girl on YouTube, but has extended into hundreds of copycat channels. These channels are inherently seasonal with thousands of cosy fall/cosy winter/cosy spring and cosy summer specific playlists.

There’s a whole TV/Home cosy crossover around ‘The Gilmore Girls Aesthetic’, almost entirely driven by Pinterest. It’s super seasonal, but for every season, it has generated over 200k posts in the last year. Not bad for a TV show that aired 24 years ago! It ties back to the cosy love and ongoing trend of all things nostalgic.

Movie nights and in particular family movie nights are also part of this theme, people don’t talk about specific shows or movies, more the idea of getting cosy and watching something. The content itself is almost irrelevant.

Spotlight on Cosy Gaming

What is cosy gaming and why should you care?

Gaming is now a bigger industry than music, TV, and film combined. The UKIE projects it to be worth over 200 billion dollars globally by 2025.

People think of gaming as a male-dominated Call of Duty/Helldivers space. Although this is true tot a certain exten, there’s a growing gaming genre that is the opposite of this intense, action-fuelled melee. The concept of cosy gaming isn’t new; these types of games have been around for a long while.

Cosy gaming, or wholesome gaming, refers to video games that provide a relaxing, calming, and stress-free gaming experience, usually with simple gameplay mechanics, non-photo realistic visual styles, and a focus on activities like crafting, farming, exploring, or building. The trend gained popularity around the late 2000s and early 2010s with games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley, but it really kicked off again during the pandemic with Animal Crossing New Horizons. The vibe here is supremely low-stakes and peaceful.

These are the hashtag views on TikTok around some of the bigger cosy gaming hashtags.

It’s quite large.

Below you’ll see the global search data around cosy gaming over the last five years. It’s definitely trending up.

Key Findings

Demographically, cozy gamers are much more likely to be female than male.
Cosy gaming does not peak in Autumn/Fall but is instead remarkably consistent year round
According to the data we can access, cosy gamers are most likely younger millennials.
Cozy gamers are also into art, collecting, anime and cats
As the market becomes more saturated gamers are becoming bored with
formulaic games
Nintendo Switch is the unofficial home of cozy gaming but since the release of the Steam Deck many gamers are considering switching due to the wider variety
of games
Reddit is just about the gaming whereas TikTok and Pinterest heavily crossover into the whole cozy lifestyle and aesthetic.

Cozy gaming is accessible to all!

The demographic data available to us will always have a platform skew.

I found this Reddit thread in r/CozyGamers last week talking about how old gamers on this sub were.

The ages ranged from teens to people in their mid-70s.

Cozy gaming is for non-traditional gamers.

Final thoughts

In 2024 everything can be cosy.

This mass of connections shows the crossover from #cozy to other hashtags on TikTok over the last 60 days.

It crosses over with gaming, friends, autumn, interior design, ASMR, cottagecore, Minecraft, booktok, nature, Hello Kitty, loungewear, productivity, gardening, romance, moods, TV shows, photography, goblincore, cooking, and many more.

This is just one platform, 2 months worth of data, and outside of the traditional cosy season.

Cosy is here to stay and it’s happening year round.

If you’d like to learn more about anything I’ve shared here, or you have a project you’d like to collaborate on, please send me a message!

How to really connect with your audience in the age of ‘Peak TV’

Kim · Jun 2, 2017 ·

Earlier this year, I gave a quick talk at the TV Connect conference about how you can use social media to get right to the heart of your viewer base, even in the age of peak TV.

Below is an embed of the deck and a shortened version of my speaker notes.

So first a bit of background. What is peak tv? Put simply; it’s just that there are too many shows.

According to Research, 455 original scripted programs aired on American television in 2016, that’s up from 210 shows in 2009. A massive increase. Now I realise we’re in the UK, but with global release dates becoming more common, access to Netflix and on-demand programming, alongside satellite and cable, we’re in a very similar situation. There’s ‘too much’ great stuff out there.

I don’t know how much you guys know about fandom, so I’ll explain a little.

Fandom has been around for a long time. It’s not new. Fun fact, loads of the fandom vernacular (shipping for example) actually originates from the first Star Trek series.

Fandom essentially means anything that fans create around the thing they love, and the fans themselves. E.g Comicon is all about fandom.

Tumblr, a slightly lesser know social/blogging network is the home to all things fandom.

The takeaway here for social TV is that the fandom itself LOVES the show we’re trying to market. They’re overwhelmingly positive about it.

So, how do you find out about what your fandom are into? (click for gif)

Always start with Tumblr

Fandometrics is a weekly updated part of Tumblr that ranks all the different fandoms on Tumblr by subject. It is an invaluable research tool for Social TV with any kind of millennial/Z fanbase.

My strategies always start with talking to the fandom. Identifying these guys is like finding the biggest built in advocates for your show. So I start with them and then the social influencer and bloggers start to pay attention, and from there you can reach the mainstream.

Back to Doctor who again. While I was writing the strategy for the Mission Dalek campaign, I felt it was really important to understand the implications of the different types of audience who were fans of shows on different platforms. For example, when looking at the best way to connect with Dr Who fans on Instagram I identified a huge community of girls who cosplay as the various female assistants. I decided to leverage this as a way to get the often overlooked younger female Whovians involved in our competition, by allowing them to enter with cosplay images.

The US broadcaster CW knows this better than anyone else. Social TV champions from the get-go, they figured out which shows had the biggest audiences on which platforms and prioritised content there way back in 2014. Reign was all about Pinterest due to the costumes; Supernatural has always ruled Tumblr and the then new ‘The Flash’ was fast becoming a YouTube sensation.

Understanding which of your fans are on which platforms and the content that resonates on that platform will help you more than anything else when it comes to engagement planning.

And so to my final, and most important point.

When social first started, way back a decade ago, building communities was the whole point of Twitter. Then marketing came and suddenly it was a place just to advertise. Community was out of the proverbial window.

Well, the one sure-fire secret to really engaging with your fans in the age of peak TV, is to hire a great community manager.

A community manager is like a social media manager ‘plus’ They are tasked not just with publishing updates and responding to enquiries, but actively being involved in, and growing the community that they’re looking after.

I was writing the social strategy for E4 a couple of years back, and to test my hypothesis I took on community management duties for one week.

During that time e4 were airing Supernatural but weren’t really aware of the huge fandom around it. I created a strategy to truly engage with the fans by doing things like:

Creating content that would resonate with them
Speaking in their language ‘shipping terms etc.’
Live tweeting key moments of the shows

This resulted in not just an outpouring of love for e4 from fans during the week, but also with metrics.

The week leading up to my community management, there had been a paid campaign running, I won’t disclose how much, but it was a not insignificant amount of money. This achieved 572k impressions.

The week I took over, organically, we achieved almost 750 thousand impressions.

Which just goes to show what a combination of a good social strategy and a good community manager who knows your content can do.