If trends move faster than ever, how can licensing businesses keep up?

It was a real question from the audience at one of our recent TrendLens webinars, and it is one the whole industry is asking. The answer is that reacting faster depends on seeing sooner.

Licensing is not short of opportunity. Global sales of licensed merchandise and services reached a record $389.8 billion in 2025, up 5.45% on the year and once again outpacing the wider retail market, according to Licensing International's 2026 Global Licensing Industry Study. Gaming, creator culture, experiential entertainment and new forms of fandom have opened more routes to monetise a property than the industry has ever had.

The challenge is identifying the right opportunities early enough to act on them — especially when you are working around manufacturing lead times, retail cycles, approvals, trademark processes, asset creation and long-term forecasting.

The answer isn't simply reacting faster; it's understanding audiences better. It's understanding how discovery, fandom and engagement now evolve across dozens of platforms, communities and experiences simultaneously.Adam Woodgate, VP of Research Solutions, The Insights Family

The real shift is fragmentation

Trends do move faster than they used to. Product cycles are shorter, viral toys and collectibles can appear and fade inside a single season, and what kids asked for last quarter is often not what they want this one. That alone would make licensing harder. What compounds it is where kids' attention now lives: spread across gaming platforms, creators, streaming, social channels and real-world communities, often several at once.

For decades, licensing followed a predictable path. A show or film launched, awareness built through mainstream media, retailers responded and merchandise followed. You could see a property coming. Today, discovery happens everywhere at the same time, and it rarely starts where it used to.

This matters more in kids and family than in almost any other category, because the usual ways of reading an audience are closed to you. Regulation around children's data means the behavioural signals brands lean on elsewhere are limited or unavailable for under-18s.

That is the gap we exist to fill. We ask kids and families directly, from age 3 through to 18, across 22 markets and around 800,000 surveys a year. It gives licensing businesses a first-party read on how kids think, feel and act about IP and licensed product — and because their interests move quickly, we survey every day, so you can act on today's preferences rather than yesterday's sales data.

Traditional licensing versus the modern environment

The licensing model itself is evolving because the environment around it has changed significantly.

Traditional licensing model compared with the modern licensing environment

Traditional model	Modern environment
Discovery driven by TV, cinema and retail	Discovery happens across gaming, creators, TikTok and social platforms
Clear launch campaigns	Continuous engagement loops
Merchandise followed content success	Merchandise evolves in parallel with content, creators and fandom
A few dominant franchises held most attention	Attention and spend spread across a wider portfolio
Forecasts ran over long cycles	Demand can shift within a single season
Global-first campaigns	Culturally specific local properties can scale worldwide
Linear customer journeys	Multi-platform discovery behaviour
Retail as the primary fandom touchpoint	Digital and physical experiences work together

This is why the conversation in the webinar framed the challenge as one of agility rather than pure speed. The strongest licensing businesses are unlikely to be the ones reacting to every viral moment. They will be the companies capable of identifying which trends are culturally meaningful, which have staying power, and where short-term momentum can translate into long-term commercial opportunity.

The next big kids' IP could come from anywhere

One of the strongest themes to emerge from the webinar was that the next major kids' franchise is unlikely to follow the traditional path. It might begin on a gaming platform, with a YouTube creator, as a social-first character, or inside a community that has built real momentum long before traditional media or retail take notice.

The industry's own numbers show the balance tipping. Within character and entertainment licensing, the largest category of all, anime, video games, comics and social media properties now account for 34% of revenue, just ahead of feature film and television at 33%, according to Licensing International's 2026 study.

Minecraft is the obvious example: a game that grew into an entertainment and licensing ecosystem across merchandise, publishing, experiences and, more recently, film. It is not unique. Creator-led brands and digital-native properties increasingly decide where kids form their attachments.

For you, that changes where the search begins. The question is no longer "what is the next big television property", it is "where are kids discovering the characters and communities that could become tomorrow's licences".

Discovery moves further from television as kids get older, not closer. The earliest signals of commercial potential often appear in audience behaviour long before they are reflected in retail performance or sales data. That is why licensing businesses need visibility across platforms, communities and markets: understanding where kids are discovering new interests is becoming as important as understanding what those interests are.

The next global property may start in a local market

It is tempting to treat global franchises and local trends as separate things. More often they are the same story at different stages: many of the properties with global reach today began as culturally specific, local phenomena and grew outward.

Anime is the clearest case — culturally specific content that became a global fandom across streaming, gaming, merchandise, live events and licensing. K-pop followed the same path. Neither began as a global product. They started local and proved able to travel.

The commercial skill is spotting early which culturally resonant property has the qualities to scale beyond its home market. Those signals are hard to read from any single market, because the evidence sits in how a property behaves across countries and cultures. In recent years that has often meant looking East: Licensing International's 2026 study names North Asia the fastest-growing licensing region last year, up 14.1%.

Fandom now shows up in more places

For today's kids, enjoying a favourite character, creator or franchise isn't limited to watching a programme or playing a game. It becomes part of everyday life, through the products they use, wear, collect and ask for — stickers and stationery, clothing and bedroom décor, food and drink collaborations, collectibles and toys inspired by a favourite YouTuber or gaming franchise.

The question for licensing teams has moved from "can this IP sell products?" to "how many ways can this audience engage with it?" Merchandise is only one part of the ecosystem. From there, fandom extends into creator communities, live experiences and location-based entertainment, which Licensing International records as one of the industry's fastest-growing categories. The more touchpoints a property has, the more resilient the fandom tends to be — and in practice the same child uses many of them at once.

Teenagers engage just as widely, but the mix moves with age: 13 to 18s are more likely to follow a favourite on social media (20%) and less likely to buy toys. Understanding that breadth, and how it shifts as kids grow up, tells you not just where demand exists today but where it could travel next.

Evergreen bets and short-term trends

Not every trend becomes a licence worth backing. The commercial discipline is telling durable fandom apart from momentary heat before you commit spend, shelf space and approvals behind it.

Evergreen licensing bets compared with short-term trend activations

Evergreen licensing bets	Short-term trend activations
Established, cross-generational demand	Emerging cultural momentum
Multi-year retail confidence	Short activation windows
Predictable demand patterns	Higher volatility
Lower risk, long-term portfolio value	Higher risk, higher potential reward

This is where audience insight earns its place: how kids are discovering brands and characters, where engagement is deepening, which communities are growing, and whether interest is sustained or temporary.

There is a fifth question that is easy to miss — how parents shape children's discovery through the brands and characters they grew up with. Nostalgia has always played a role in licensing, but today's Millennial and older Gen Z parents are introducing a new generation to the entertainment they loved. That creates opportunities for established IP to find new relevance, not simply through heritage but through shared family fandom. Future growth isn't driven solely by emerging franchises; it can also come from legacy IP that still resonates with today's parents and is being passed on to their kids.

Kids usually get there first

One of the most useful ways to think about modern fandom is that kids often lead it. The platforms, creators and communities shaping their attention today frequently become mainstream years later. The pattern has repeated across gaming, streaming, creator-led media and social platforms. Kids are often the earliest signal of where entertainment, commerce and fandom are heading next, because audience behaviour tends to change before commercial infrastructure does.

Fandom now develops across more places, more platforms and more forms of participation than ever before — through creators, gaming, communities, YouTube, live experiences, retail and parents. That is both the challenge and the opportunity.

The opportunity for licensing has never been larger. But identifying which signals matter, which audiences are driving them and which trends can scale commercially requires a deeper understanding of audience behaviour than traditional licensing models were designed to provide. The businesses that succeed won't necessarily be the ones reacting fastest. They'll be the ones understanding audiences earliest.