How brands communicate is often determined by what’s tasteful. But today a new visual trend is emerging, one that places importance not on what’s deemed acceptable but on a subversion of that.
Today’s contemporary branding and communication are shaped by authenticity. Earnest examinations of contemporary culture and brand heritage feel pervasive – if not totally oversaturated. It seems the landscape of brand communication consists mainly of long-winded monologues littered with references to legacy, heritage, authenticity and craft.
But today’s new generation of consumers are not the type to take things at face value. They are, in fact, a generation often defined by their tendency to scrutinise and question. Today, relying on authenticity tropes seems lazy and predictable.
In response to the over saturation of ‘authenticity’, a playful and anarchic visual narrative has been building. While much of a brand’s current strategies are based on what is and isn’t acceptable to say, and what is and isn’t acceptable to depict, this new narrative plays with and challenges these notions of taste and acceptability. In a landscape dominated by earnestness and authority, a new set of brands and creatives are defiantly rebelling against the rules by introducing new images and content to test our limits of taste.
Source: Protein | Testing the Limits: How Brands Are Subverting Taste
