Morning Consult’s Fastest Growing Brands report sparks conversation in the communications and marketing industries, and this year is no exception. From surprising surges in legacy brands to TikTok users behaving like an entirely separate market, the findings point to major shifts in how consumers discover, trust and engage with brands.
Chief Marketer spoke with Bobby Blanchard, Senior Director of Audience Development at Morning Consult, to dig into what marketers need to know: the rising power of TikTok-fueled brand moments, unexpected momentum among Boomers, and how AI tools are reshaping search, discovery and brand trust.
Chief Marketer: What stood out to you the most in the report? Any brands whose rise was unexpected?
Bobby Blanchard, Senior Director of Audience Development at Morning Consult: So the fastest growing brand for all U.S. adults was DoorDash. That initially was a little surprising to me. We often see a new brand or brand that had a really big viral moment at the top of the rankings. Last year the fastest growing brand was the WNBA, and in 2023 the fastest growing brand was ChatGPT, which was new to the general population. DoorDash is not a new brand. When I dove into the data [I asked] who is driving this growth for DoorDash? The boomer generation was really seeing an interest in DoorDash, which was interesting, given as a demographic that, according to our research, tends to be slow to adapt to new old technologies. Fruit of the Loom was the second fastest growing brand on the list and stuck out to me as well. There’s a funny economic term that gets thrown around, sometimes called the M.U.I.. This is the “Men’s Underwear Index,” and it is an economic index that can supposedly detect the beginnings of an economic slump, when underwear sales go down.
CM: TikTok users are a distinct segment [in the report]. You’ve identified those users as behaving like a completely separate market segment. What makes their ranking so different from these traditional demographics? What are you guys looking at?
BB: What we did for this year is we built a ranking just of people who are using TikTok and seeing what brands are growing the fastest for those users. We did that because for a while now, TikTok has kind of been the “it” social media app. It really has taken over. It’s one of the more dominating pulses of social media, particularly for young consumers, who I think brands are really hungry to win interest and cultural consideration from. What immediately fascinated me, the instant I pulled that list, were brands that had viral or really cool social media moments or TikTok specific moments this year.
CM: And for example, what would you say is a TikTok moment?
BB: Sprite was the number three fastest growing brand amongst TikTok users in 2025, and Sprite literally launched a new temporary product line this year called Sprite + Tea that was inspired by social media users, steeping tea bags in sprite. And let me tell you, don’t knock it till you try it — pretty delicious. That’s a great example of a brand … engaging in social listening and then acting based on what they see.
CM: AI shows up on the list, and earned media now feeds AI discovery. What does this mean for brands trying to shape their narrative?
BB: Brands, communicators and businesses have for years been thinking about SEO. They also have to be thinking about AEO now too — Answer Engine Optimization—to ensure that your brand is coming up for consumers in AI chat. That means having really key strategies like FAQs in place [on a brand website], incorporating schema markup, focusing on conversational question-based keywords — that is really essential for anybody publishing anything online right now to make sure their content is discoverable by AI.
CM: There are all these AI brands out there right now. All these different AI platforms, but the one that was in the fastest growing brands was ChatGPT. Now, do you have any information about why people prefer ChatGPT as opposed to, say, Gemini, or Perplexity, or others?
BB: That’s a great question. So we ask a lot of the things about the brands that we track. For example, how aware are you of a brand? What’s your trust towards the brand? What are you considering towards the brand in terms of purchasing? And the thing that sticks out for ChatGPT is they have gone beyond the highest number of a percent of awareness, right? They were one of the earliest ones out there, so they have just a very high awareness. They have a really good trust pool relative to other AI. And they also have the highest total consideration by almost 10 points compared to second place being Microsoft Copilot. Now something like Grok, the AI chatbot on Twitter [X], has basically half the awareness that ChatGPT has, which means it also has a much lower trust score, and a much lower total consideration score as well.
Want more on Morning Consult’s Fastest Growing Brands 2025? Head to PRNEWS for a full video interview on the report.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
