I find the discourse around “taste” lately to be so lame.

If you haven’t noticed, there’s a trend of people claiming that AI won’t kill creativity, it just exposes whether you have taste or not. The idea is that AI lowers the bar for execution, making it really easy for anyone to generate logos, concepts or entire campaigns. Now that everyone can produce polished work, ‘bad taste’ is more visible.

But it is complete nonsense.

Because taste is entirely subjective.

And no one can decide what people will or won’t like. Different strokes for different folks. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We have endless cliches to describe this. Using these cliches here feels like poor taste, but hey, I’m not gonna decide that for you.

This article is about “bad” taste. Let’s go.

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An entire corner of the Internet dedicated to bad taste

I have to point this out before getting into consumer goods side because it’s just too funny. There’s a subreddit where I stole the title for this article from - Awful Taste But Great Execution. It’s exactly what it sounds like.

It’s a place where people share things that the majority of us find cringey or terrible, but that someone out there probably deeply loves.

Like this suitcase. I personally wouldn’t do that but I’m so happy she did.

I do feel like this suitcase would be a wonderful gift for my brother-in-law Mark. Either his face, or hers actually.

I’m using this absolute nonsense to illustrate my point more broadly. When everyone has access to execution, it doesn’t expose good or bad taste. It just means people can do whatever the fk they want. And that’s kinda cool?

Who am I to judge?

I think I have good taste. But that’s because it’s mine, so no shit. The idea that ugly things can be appealing to other people has really only been exposed to me through work.

I remember seeing a cleaning brand launch with what I thought was the most trashy design I’d seen in a long while.

I got all judgemental, taking a stance that the product wouldn’t sell because of its design. We were doing some work in the category so we partnered up with our friends at Stickybeak to actually test the design and see what consumers think.

The results floored me.

I now use this as a fun little exercise every time I do a talk. We take a room of marketing people, get them to vote on the spectrum of premium vs cheap (everyone always says cheap) and then we expose the general populations view. Cue: shock and horror.

Subjectively ugly but objectively successful

This clash lives in every corner of the supermarket. Personally I both love and hate this.

Gentle Giants is a very real and very successful brand of dog food. And all of their packaging looks completely clapped out to me. But I love that it exists, that people actually buy this and that the people running it get to stamp their imprint on the world.

Ugly design hides in plain sight. And bad taste wins every day.

If you spend more than 6 seconds looking at Monster energy, it screams teen angst. The neon green claw marks are kinda lame and the Monster type face just looks trashy.

But it is one of the most recognisable energy brands on earth.

Takis just officially launched in Australia’s biggest supermarket.

If this was a new brand, I think we’d be scratching our heads trying to figure out how it fits into the current ‘better-for-you’ design trend taking over the aisles.

But it gets a pass, because it’s a legacy brand simply launching in a new market. And I can guarantee you it’s success won’t come down to whether people think the design is cool or not.

If taste was the arbiter of success, half our shelves would be empty

The fact that AI can “expose” bad taste really means jack shit.

Bad taste is often just good strategy you don’t like looking at.

The market is the only true judge of taste that matters.

What do you think? I read every reply and love to chat about this stuff.