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Taste in an Age of Endless Choice

Tom Vanderbilt
Knopf, 2016

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Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Eye Opening
  • Overview
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Journalist Tom Vanderbilt tries to crack the taste code by researching where museums hang paintings, how Netflix tracks viewer preferences, how the US Army makes “Meals, Ready-to-Eat,” and other examples. Accurately predicting customer preferences is the holy grail for online retailers and services. Companies like Netflix and Amazon maintain a significant market advantage in this quest, thanks to the mountains of data they continually collect on customer behavior and preferences. The inexact nature of taste itself bedevils all predictive efforts: Even customers don’t seem to know why they like what they like.

Take-Aways

  • Scientists and philosophers have difficulty explaining why people like and dislike particular things. 
  • Businesses can use data to predict what customers will like, but liking is not easy to pin down.
  • Exposure to something increases your liking of it.

About the Author

Tom Vanderbilt is visiting scholar at NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, a research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and a fellow at the Design Trust for Public Space. He is also a contributing editor to Wired (UK), Outside and Artforum.

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