Branding in the age of digital fatigue
Scroll through your feed and you’ll soon be informed that ‘offline is the new online’ by content creators who are knee-deep in what’s been dubbed the ‘return of analogue’. Major publications are echoing the sentiment, with Forbes declaring 2026 as ‘the year of analog living’ and Vogue Business citing unplugging as ‘luxury’s most valuable currency’. You might be inclined to roll your eyes at this, and I get it – the dizzyingly rapid turnover rate of micro-trends leaves us with little faith in cultural permanence. And yet, I’d argue that analogue living, which is essentially the practice of being offline, is far more pervasive than trend culture would have us believe.
More than a trend, the return to analogue signals our collective yearn for the tangible, the intentional, the real. Spearheaded by Gen Zers and Millennials alike, going analogue is the direct result of deep digital fatigue, exacerbated in recent years by AI slop, the saturation of homogenised content, privacy concerns and increased polarisation. Our beloved internet, once a space ripe for creative expression and built for connection, has been hollowed out by algorithmic advertising and monetised feeds that feel eerily empty. As a result, we’ve equipped ourselves with the rose-coloured glasses of nostalgia and taken to romanticising the heydays of analogue.
Sensory hunger in a flattened world
Research by GWI for the Financial Times shows that social media has officially plateaued, peaking in 2022 and declining in usage by nearly 10% since. In this context, #analogue2026 is the natural progression of de-digitalisation. Fed up with the mind-numbing sensation of doomscrolling and fearing that brain rot might actually manifest as an irreversible medical condition (kidding), we’re finally turning away from screens. Indeed, in a world of digital flattening and dead internet theories, sensory hunger is at an all-time high.
We’re seeing this play out as a return to old-school hobbies amid a resurgence in everyday activities that were once mundane but are now highly regarded. Believe it or not, your grandmother’s ability to crochet is now a status symbol – with its inherent value being the rare ability to focus, uninterrupted, on a single task. From jigsaw puzzles, crosswords and Sudoku to paint-by-number canvases, journalling and calligraphy, creative outlets provide a much-needed offline massage for the brain.
That’s not to say digital is out of vogue. Instead, we’re returning to retro digital. In short: doomscrolling is out; vinyl and film are in. And there’s something to be said about the generational desire to own the digital content we consume. Rather than be fed algorithmically selected media, consumers are seeking to consciously sort, collect and curate their own physical libraries of hand-picked, personalised media. Perhaps it speaks to a desire for hyper-personalisation, perhaps it speaks to the slow, intentionality that underlies the analogue movement, perhaps it speaks to both.
Branding in the analogue era
The analogue movement is a clear counteraction to the saturation and speed of an AI-ridden digital landscape. As a result, the value of slow, intentional curation has never been higher. Brands seeking to resonate with their audiences are centring authenticity, intentionality and human-centric strategies. While consumers aren’t necessarily logging off, they are becoming increasingly selective of the digital spaces they inhibit. And if you want to make the cut, you need to ensure you’re creating content that favours intentional quality over mass-produced quantity.
An overview of the aesthetics championed by well performing brands today reads as an editorial spread of muted, warm shades, grainy textures, camcorder footage and tactile, tangible materials. Simply put, sensorial expression is the heart of well-performing creative strategies. In a move away from the sleek minimalism that has dominated the last decade, brands are swapping out polished content for intentional craftmanship, with a particular emphasis on craft-led details and narrative depth.
As brands clammer to create content that feels increasingly human, we’ve seen a barrage of messy, moody, textured and cluttered photography that screams ‘human made.’ From collage and mixed textures to jagged layers and hand-drawn typography, popular branding strategies are veering into hyper expression that reads more as DIY zine.
Take the candid camera reel trend as an example. It rejects polished, AI-heavy visuals by leaning into photography that is deliberately grainy and imperfect to communicate warmth, mood and memory. Grainy film photography, cropped frames, flash photography and hand-drawn elements. Messy, honest.
The sink clutter post has been done by just about every brand in the beauty and fragrance space – and for good reason. It works because it signals something specific: that there is a real person behind the product, a bathroom counter with a life lived on it, a routine rather than a campaign. The challenge, of course, is that once a visual language becomes ubiquitous, it loses the very authenticity it sought to communicate. The brands doing this well aren’t simply replicating the aesthetic, they’re interrogating what feels genuinely true to their world and letting that lead. There’s a meaningful difference between borrowing a mood and building one from scratch.
Adapting to the analogue era, then, is less about a visual overhaul and more about a wholesale recalibration of how brands show up. Across fashion, beauty and fragrance, the brands gaining ground are those that have identified what is irreducibly theirs – a mood, a material, a point of view – and are expressing it with clarity and consistency across every touchpoint. The aesthetic shift towards warmth, grain and imperfection isn’t a trend to be bolted on; it’s a symptom of a deeper demand for sincerity. Visual direction that leans analogue without a genuine creative rationale reads, frankly, as costume. Audiences are perceptive, and they can tell.
The value of a human voice
The same logic applies to written brand direction, and this is where many brands are still lagging behind. While art directors have been busy reaching for film grain and linen textures, brand copy has in many cases remained stubbornly slick. The result is a jarring dissonance: a beautifully lo-fi campaign paired with language that could have been generated in thirty seconds (and, increasingly, was). In an era defined by the rejection of digital smoothness, brand voice is one of the most powerful tools available – and one of the most underutilised.
Brands that are getting this right are investing in tone of voice work that operates with the same intentionality as their visual identities. This means moving away from frictionless, optimised copy – those interchangeable taglines and captions that prioritise SEO-readiness over soul – and towards language that has texture, specificity and point of view. The analogue consumer doesn’t want to be marketed to; they want to be spoken to. There is a significant difference. Copy that earns its place in this space tends to be unhurried, observational, and quietly confident; it trusts the reader rather than chasing them. It reads like something a person actually wrote, because the standard for that has never mattered more.
For fragrance brands in particular, the analogue moment presents a rare and well-timed opportunity. Scent is, by its very nature, analogue: deeply sensorial, resistant to digital reproduction, and inextricably tied to memory and emotion. The challenge has always been in communicating something so inherently physical through the flatness of a screen. The current cultural appetite for the sensory, the tactile and the real gives fragrance brands a more receptive audience than they’ve had in years. The brands leaning into this with genuine creative rigour – building worlds through imagery, language and experience that honour the complexity of scent – are those building the kind of brand equity that outlasts any trend cycle.
For brands seeking relevance, the analogue movement isn’t about rejecting AI altogether. Rather, successful brands are leveraging the tech behind the scenes – using it for optimising tasks like personalised clienteling and predictive logistics while limiting its use in consumer-facing content. We all know that rejecting technological advancements isn’t the solution, but keeping them tucked behind the curtain might be.
