Consumer taste is not a fixed label. Preferences emerge from experience, culture, context, practical need and the qualities a person learns to value. They also change: a customer may favour different brands, styles, colours, materials, sizes, flavours or price points as circumstances and knowledge develop.
For ecommerce retailers, this matters because an historic purchase or a broad demographic category cannot reliably describe what someone will want next. Useful relevance depends on observing the individual’s continuing behaviour and allowing new evidence to change the product ranking.
In recent years there have been several attempts to explain taste from biological perspectives: either neuroscience or evolutionary psychology. These types of explanations are vague enough to always sound true, but they rarely contain enough detail to account for the specific tastes of individuals or groups. Still, there’s much food for thought in these scientific proto-theories of taste and aesthetics.
The evolutionary explanation of consumer’s taste
An evolutionary explanation of taste assumes that human preferences arise from natural selection. We like salt, sugar and fat, according to this logic, because it was beneficial for our ancestors to seek out foods with these tastes. We like landscape scenes involving greenery and water bodies because such landscapes were promising environments for our wandering ancestors. This line of thinking is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go that far. After all, there are plenty of people who don’t much care for deep-fried salty-sweet foods. And many people who take art seriously quickly tire of clichéd landscape paintings.
Evolutionary psychology can provide broad explanations for why humans as a species tend to like certain things more than others, but it provides us with no map for navigating differences in taste between individuals and groups. (These obvious, glaring limitations of evolutionary psychology have not prevented the emergence of a cottage industry of pop science books that explain everything humans do as consequences of the incidents and accidents that befell our progenitor apes on the savannas of Africa.)
Explanations involving the neural and cognitive sciences
Explanations involving the neural and cognitive sciences get closer to what we are really after—an explanation of differences in taste—but not by much. Neuroscientific explanations are essentially halfway between cultural theories and evolutionary theories. We like things because the “pleasure centres” in our brains “light up” when we encounter them. And the pleasure centers are shaped by experience (on the time scale of a person’s life), and by natural selection (on the time scale of the species).
Whatever we inherit because of natural selection is presumably common to all humans, so differences in taste must be traced to differences in experience, which become manifest in the brain as differences in neural connectivity and activity. If your parents played the Beatles for you as a child and conveyed their pleasure to you, then associative learning might gradually modify the synapses in your brain that link sound patterns with emotional reactions, so that playing “Hey Jude” now triggers a cascade of neural events that generate the subjective feeling of enjoyment.
But there is so much more to the story of enjoyment. Not everyone likes their parents’ music. In English-speaking countries, there is a decades-old stereotype of the teenager who seeks out music to annoy their parents. And many of us have a friend who insists on listening to music that no one else seems to have heard of. What is the neural basis of this fascinating phenomenon?
“Interestingness is the first derivative of beauty”.
We must now enter extremely speculative territory. One of the most thought-provoking theories of aesthetics that I have come across was proposed by a machine learning researcher named Jürgen Schmidhuber. He has a provocative way of summing up his theory: Interestingness is the first derivative of beauty.
What he means is that we are not simply drawn to things that are beautiful or pleasurable. We are also drawn to interesting things: things that somehow intrigue us and capture our attention. These things, according to Schmidhuber, entice us with the possibility of enhancing our categories of experience. In his framework, humans and animals are constantly seeking to understand the environment, and to do this, they must be drawn to the edge of what they already know.
From changing taste to individual product selection
The commercial implication is not that a retailer can explain every preference psychologically. It is that product relevance should remain responsive. A selection based on an old segment or a single purchase will become stale; a selection that incorporates new first-party behavioural and transaction evidence can change with the customer.
SwiftERM uses that first-party evidence to rank the products each identifiable customer is most likely to buy next and determine when that individual selection should be sent. The ranking can reflect the attributes present in the retailer’s own catalogue—such as brand, style, colour, size, material, flavour, region, price and replenishment cycle—without assuming that every customer values the same combination.
The retailer keeps its existing email delivery platform. SwiftERM supplies autonomous individual product selection and timing, continually revised as the customer’s demonstrated preferences change.
An index to all SwiftERM articles is available here.
