TikTok has made trends an inevitable part of being on social media. Depending on the niche your algorithm thinks you are most likely to identify with, you could be shown a variety of things. Into fashion? Your feed is likely full of slightly scary looking, so ugly they might be cute, troll dolls attached to designer purses. Really into food? Erewhon grocery hauls might be getting a little old. But if you are into health and fitness, then the cold plunge is inescapable. But how do you take a social media trend and turn it into a thriving business? Finding your customers is key.
First, you need to identify the demographic of the customer that you want to target. Of course, that includes the basics—age, income, education level, household size—but to truly connect with customers in a trend-driven market, you need to go deeper. What are their values? What inspires their purchases? What kind of lifestyle do they aspire to maintain? If you are riding the coattails of a social media trend, looking at psychographic data that uses social behavioral data, like the data from Spatial.ai, becomes important as well. These two puzzle pieces together, the immediate social based data and the overall demographic and psychographic data, make for the best site selection strategy for these types of businesses.
Social behavior data from platforms like Spatial.ai allows businesses to tap into what people are actually talking about online and where those conversations are happening. It’s a powerful, real-time layer of context that gives insight into social alignment with emerging trends.
Recently, a new brand has popped up in Kansas City, capitalizing on the trends. Sauna and Plunge offers the obvious cold plunge and sauna experiences, all with convenient monthly membership. Its location is in Leawood, Kansas—a well-heeled suburb just outside Kansas City—Spatial.ai data shows a strong concentration of the Suburb Chic segment. These are wealthy, family-focused households who are highly engaged with health and wellness brands like Peloton, Lululemon, and Clean Juice. They’re not just spending on themselves—they’re building healthy lifestyles for their entire household. Socially, they follow Christian authors, center-right political voices, and use hashtags like #parenting and #relationships. In short: they are the ideal early adopters of premium wellness trends like saunas and cold plunges. The map below shows the segment with the location of the Sauna and Plunge location.
To validate what social media sentiment is telling us, we can layer in Behaviors and Attitudes data, like our “Fitness Fans” profile. These are areas where adults report high engagement in fitness, sports, and active lifestyles. In the second map above, Leawood lights up—especially in neighborhoods east and west of Mission Road, where more than 14% of the adult population qualifies as Fitness Fans.
This overlap—where social behavior (Suburb Chic) and psychographic behavior (Fitness Fans) both peak—creates a sweet spot for wellness-oriented retail. The Leawood area isn’t just passively aware of the cold plunge trend; it’s filled with households already inclined to act on it, spend on it, and share it with their networks.
By combining social listening with behavioral targeting, brands can better predict where a trend will stick—not just where it’s going viral. And in a world where trend-based retail concepts can burn bright and fade fast, that kind of data-driven clarity makes all the difference.
Recent Comments