Last week, Waitrose found itself at the centre of a controversy: £10 Lindt “Dubai-style” chocolate bars, inspired by a viral Middle Eastern dessert, were flying off shelves so fast the supermarket had to impose a two-bar-per-person limit.
The story has now triggered a rush by legacy brands, challenger confectioners, and supermarkets alike to create their own take on the pistachio-and-knafeh treat.
But this isn’t just a fun (and lucrative) moment for retail. It’s a clear signal of where brand power lives today – not just in paid media plans or polished 30-second spots, but in community-fuelled ecosystems where trends rise and fall by the needs of the feed and collective curiosity, not traditional top-down messaging.
The Dubai-style chocolate phenomenon wasn’t born from a media agency’s brief or a traditional product launch calendar. It came from culture, and more importantly, from people. And as siloed channels collapse and linear brand-building strategies erode, this kind of community-first momentum is what modern brands must learn to both respect and harness.
Community first, not social first
At VML, we talk a lot about being culture first – not simply social first. The difference is crucial.
’Social first’ implies that the channel is a priority; ’community first’ implies the audience is the priority. It means listening before speaking. It means activating not just for the feed, but for the mood, the moment, and the movement.
In the case of Dubai-style chocolate, brands that were tapped into the conversation didn’t wait – they co-created with the community, refracted the moment through their own lens, and embedded themselves in a conversation already happening.
Read more: All the new Dubai chocolate launches in UK grocery 2025
Brands today can’t create culture in the same way they used to. They participate in it. And increasingly, they need to do so across collapsing channels with coherence and agility.
It’s not about launching a campaign on Instagram and then “cutting it down” for TikTok. It’s about finding the connective tissue that lets a brand live and breathe authentically wherever its audience already is – from the street to WhatsApp groups to the shelf in a Waitrose store.
A new age of virality
This is especially urgent in the current AI revolution, where speed, scale and creative volume are exploding. With generative content tools capable of filling feeds in seconds, brand differentiation is no longer about how much content you make – it’s about how deeply that content resonates with the communities you serve.
AI can help fuel the fire, but it’s the spark of human relevance – a shared craving, a cultural nod, a “you had to be there” moment – that lights it in the first place.
Culture can’t be bought – but it can be joined
What the Dubai chocolate story proves is that scarcity, virality, and desirability can be manufactured – but only if you understand what people already want.
Waitrose didn’t make the moment, it met it. Lindt didn’t invent the trend, it moved quickly and tastefully into it. And the creators who started it? They did so not through big budgets, but through cultural intuition and community connection.
This should be a wake-up call for every brand still clinging to channel hierarchies or social-first thinking. Your audience isn’t waiting for your next ad – they’re out there building the next trend.
The only question is: will you be part of it? Not as a guest, but as a contributor.
Christina Miller is chief social executive at VML EMEA
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