The Return of the Real - Cultural and content trends in a maturing new normality – China trends and cultural insight

Collection of the most recent pandemic related content with deep dive into semiotics and cultural insight analysis, to identify cultural trends and how brands can tap into them evolving their strategy and expression
07 December 2022
woman with cup
Panos
Panos
Dimitropoulos

Senior Director Semiotics, Cultural Intelligence and Future Forecasting

The new era

The arrival and continuously growing global pandemic has altered the principles that people are used to live with, manifesting diverse form of people’s mindsets, lifestyle and cognition, which in essence, leads to different purposes of lives.

In order for the brands to stay connected with their audiences, the acknowledgement of how the post pandemic cultural trend becomes necessary. 

Celebration of human realness

It is not hard to notice that the awareness of health care got a tremendous increase over the past 3 years, the once “forgotten” realness of being a human is brought back to the surface. The emphasis on humanism, authenticity and realism have been the core of trend evolving, we no longer pay attention to how cutting edge we are, instead putting the focus back on ourselves as human.

In the The Return of the Real report, we have gathered contents related to the pandemic in the fields of cross category brand communications, social media UGC, products & services, art & design, that helps us identify 3+1 cultural trend to inspire post pandemic strategies. 

In the report, the 3 main trends we closely tied to the idea of realness:

Real Feelings – Mental Vibrancy
Strong emphasize on injecting positive energy, with expression of humor, cuteness, playfulness, finding everyday elements of happiness to light up the mood that has been traumatized by the constant uncertainty of daily life during pandemic.

Real Moments – Everyday Celebration
The long-lasting lockdown period has divided us from daily normality, long enough for us to forgot how the everyday life looks like. In that essence, once we are finally out from our doors, the appreciation of everyday life has raised to a new level, more patience and focus are put into daily object and scenarios for brands to link with their audience.

Real Connections – Caring Humanism
The absence of real-life face-to-face communication has caused a threat towards the connectivity nature of us as human, the value of outdoor social activities and community belongings are becoming cherished more, the idea of social wellbeing becomes a priority for the protection of human nature. 

In addition to the main trends, we discover another trend which has direct reflection on the product & service territory:

Design Trend – Sanitized Design
Functionality that focuses on building trust and reliability, evolving around the concept of clean and healthy.