Is this the Age of Recycling? The era when AI takes the reins and generates all the new ideas we need from all the old stuff that’s lying around? All the cautionary posts about how to avoid sounding or looking like AI slop suggest that we are wallowing in the content equivalent of hash made from centuries of leftovers.
Maybe it was bound to happen. After all, we spent 30 years sharing our thinking online like a bunch of monkeys producing Shakespeare. Now it’s all just there for the taking, copyrights be damned. And how well our thinking gets recycled may not matter: there’s so much content out there that it will always feel new to someone.
Feeling a Little Meh Today
Culture watchdogs are already wringing their hands, bemoaning the meh-ification of everything, the flattening of sensibilities. The good news is that the hand-wringing is leading to a vibrant exploration of where bursts of originality will come from—and whether they are sustainable in an era when AI vacuums up every innovation and spits it out in some derivative form.
It’s hard to argue that originality won’t continue to matter. There are centuries of abandoned trends that suggest that we all get bored quickly with what’s been done before. Thanks to the immediacy of the digital world, even the constant stream of new-new-new becomes old.
Which is why Nitin Nohria’s piece on good taste in The Atlantic is so intriguing. He argues that taste is an ultimate differentiator, a competitive advantage that is worth cultivating over a lifetime. He also surmises that because taste is about reading the complexity of a cultural moment—the distillation of a vibe, let’s say—it’s difficult for an emotionless AI to get it right.
Will the Age of Recycling evolve into the Age of the Tastemaker? Who knows? Maybe Chief Tastemaker will be the hot new role; there have certainly been more absurd titles. Nohria suggests that taste is where individuals may still capture value:
When every option is instantly available, when every variation is possible, the person who knows which one to choose becomes even more valuable.
The Taste of Strategy
Spark No. 9 is all about experiments, so we think about taste a lot. Most of the experiments we run are to calibrate interest in new product concepts or to validate repositioning a brand or to find new audiences for old products. All of them are about strategy and how strategy comes to life on the front lines—meaning where customers make purchase decisions.
In every experiment, taste matters because differentiation matters. As Nohria suggests, old differentiators—product features, service levels, speed—may fall away as AI the equalizer levels the playing field. When AI can design, write, code, and so on, everything is fungible. So how do you decide what to move forward with?
You test taste.
Taste isn’t style—it can’t be described as a single aesthetic that AI tools can apply to different objects or settings. Taste is more of a system of choices that reflect a point of view. And taste is influenced by culture that changes every day. When you are making a big bet on something new or different, you want to be sure that your point of view—your taste—is the right one.
Surprise!
Eighteen months ago we helped a very well-funded startup test a new beauty product. The only real boundary was the underlying molecule, which offered a distinctive improvement to products in an existing category.
The lack of limitations meant that we could test many different factors in presenting the new product to the market—format, packaging, brand name, branding, palette, and more. But what we really tested were different systems of taste: aesthetics, yes, but also how the product was used, whether it seemed personal (individual packaging for each use) or environmentally responsible (bulk packaging), how the palette and font made us feel, what world each ad created for the user, etc.
We were surprised by the results. But we are usually surprised by our test results. There is almost always one dark-horse audience that responds in a way no one expected when they encounter an ad for something new. It’s why experimentation often finds market opportunities in unusual venues.
It’s also why experimentation is a good way to test different approaches to taste.
Most of us are not Jenna Lyons or Laila Gohar or Jony Ive. While some of us share their confidence in making decisions about taste, very few of us have their track records.
Experiments provide a guidepost for taste, a way of confirming that, indeed, your taste is aligned with a market that shifts faster than ever. So even if you are not a tastemaker, the ability to test and refine might just be your unfair advantage in the sea of sameness.