Cream and Spirit, Milk and Honey: Baileys and the cultural origins of indulgence

Baileys, an alcoholic drinks brand, conducted a global, cross-category study to understand how indulgence differs depending on cultural beliefs and different social functions.

Synopsis

Our semiotic analysis of indulgence began its life as part of an innovation project, specifically investigating the visual language which different innovations could tap into in order to harness different 'indulgent' occasions in American women's lives. We looked at how brands communicated around indulgence cross-category, from fashion to food, and identified several different 'kinds' of indulgence, each with an associated visual language and set of design tropes.

These types of indulgence were split along fascinating axes. Some forms of indulgence, for example, relied on a sense that indulgence was fundamentally maximalist – that it involved adding...

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