By Bobby McGill
McCann Singapore’s Behavioral Sciences and Insights Manager on how brands are expressing authenticity through humor, play, and joyful imperfection.
In an era where brands are trying to connect with audiences on more human terms, how they define and express authenticity is changing. According to McCann’s recent NextUp culture drop, the most telling signal of 2026 is the growing role of humor and play.
For much of 2025, consumers expressed authenticity through emotional transparency — breakups documented online, burnout shared openly, therapy speak became commonplace on social posts. But there is only so much heaviness a culture can metabolize. Constant sincerity can be exhausting, and oversharing creates its own form of pressure.
Brands are taking note.
To explore what’s driving the shift and how brands are approaching authenticity, we spoke with Elizabeth Tan, Behavioral Sciences and Insights Manager at McCann Singapore.
In the conversation that follows, Tan discusses the behavioral logic behind humor and play, what “joyful imperfection” means for brand design, why visible flaws are becoming signals of trust in an AI-saturated landscape, and which brands are getting authenticity right.
In 2025, authenticity was about emotional transparency. We saw people documenting breakups, burnout, and therapy speak as a proof of realness. But there’s only so much heaviness a culture can metabolise. Constant sincerity becomes exhausting and even performative. Oversharing feels like another form of pressure.
By 2026, we saw a recalibration. Instead of proving our humanity through vulnerability, people have shifted to using awkwardness, irony and humour, which allow people to stay honest without being heavy. And this doesn’t mean people are being untruthful; it’s just about lessening the emotional intensity.
Behaviourally, play lowers the stakes. When something is framed playfully, it lowers the perceived social risk. Humour therefore, acts as an emotional buffer, which is especially important in today’s climate of hyper-visibility. Play creates psychological safety for one to express themselves more freely.
In today’s climate, consumers are no longer in constant panic, but they have been navigating volatility for a long time. This has created an underlying sense of tension. When seriousness has become background noise, humour then becomes the way we regulate our emotions. Gallows humour, absurd memes – these are all collective coping mechanisms that allow people to acknowledge instability without being consumed or overwhelmed by it.
When seriousness has become background noise, humour then becomes the way we regulate our emotions.
This is why Gen Alpha’s embrace of absurd memes is not simply “brain rot” but a way of culturally participating and connecting with others.
For years, we’ve seen how polish is used to signal control and aspiration – think minimalist, that girl trend, and the quiet luxury era. But in today’s climate, hyper-polish can signal distance and detachment from reality. It feels corporate, optimised, and even AI-generated. Embracing imperfection then becomes the response to that.
Joyful imperfection communicates a sense of confidence and not taking life too seriously.
Joyful imperfection communicates a sense of confidence and not taking life too seriously. One of the examples comes from chaos packaging, where brands are deliberately embracing maximalism in design – such as bold typography, clashing colours, unexpected formats. This signals that brands don’t need to be rigid in order to prove they are credible. This shift is not towards messiness, but warmth.
AI has made perfection cheap. It has become so easy to generate flawless lighting, porcelain skin, and seamless designs, that we stopped rewarding effort. And the more seamless and generated everything looks, the harder it has become to tell what’s real and what’s not. This has resulted in AI fatigue. Humans need clear signals of reality, effort, and authorship.
AI has made perfection cheap. It has become so easy to generate flawless lighting, porcelain skin, and seamless designs, that we stopped rewarding effort.
Anti-AI aesthetics and visible imperfections now signal a sense of human presence, and time and effort invested. A sign that there was a human behind this – which we something we ultimately value.
Today, smarter authenticity understands nuance. Back in 2025, we thought trauma-dumping, oversharing and vulnerability were signals of authenticity. Today, authenticity doesn’t glorify the struggle. It acknowledges imperfection without making it a spectacle. It has become emotionally intelligent. We recognise that audiences are today tired of extremes, they neither want to be hyper-polished, nor hyper-exposed.
Today, authenticity doesn’t glorify the struggle. It acknowledges imperfection without making it a spectacle.
For brands, showing up smarter means revealing process more than performance, and using humour with intention. It means resisting the urge to over-optimise, and allow warmth, texture and humanity to come through.
Three brands come to mind that display authenticity in very different ways.
Sol de Janeiro
The first is Sol de Janeiro, the beauty and body care brand. What the brand gets right about authenticity in today’s climate is that it does away with the flaw-spotlighting. It doesn’t position itself around “real skin struggles” but around pleasure, texture and celebration, without shame or aspiration anxiety.
Its Brazilian identity is also not performative, but embedded in the naming, tone, and experience. It stands out in today’s beauty category because it emotionally feels lighter and more sustainable in the long run.
Nothing
The other brand is the Nothing phone. It’s perceived as more authentic than the other big tech brands because it positions itself as a challenger brand, explicitly against the polished corporate feel of tech incumbents like Apple and Samsung. It has a transparent hardware aesthetic and distinctive design show it deliberately breaks category norms and signals openness and personality.
The founder, Carl Pei, talks openly about wanting to “make tech fun again”, targeting creative, design-oriented users. It has also experimented with community co-creation (e.g. the Phone 3a Community Edition was designed with fan participation), which deepens engagement and gives consumers a sense of ownership.
Duolingo
A third brand that has recently also embraced this playful absurdity is Duolingo. Its social media presence is chaotic, slightly unhinged, but it is a brand that shows it understands internet culture without pandering. (It has also reminded me that it’s been 167 days since my last French lesson!)
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