In the movie When Harry Met Sally, Marie (Carrie Fisher) and Jess (Bruno Kirby) move in together and argue over keeping his wagon-wheel coffee table. Jess insists, “I have good taste!” And Marie responds, “Look, everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor, but they couldn’t possibly all have good taste.”
When it comes to marketing, questions about who has the right “taste” for breakthrough visual content and which design will move an audience to action plague the creative side of the business.
Every marketer can recall a visually creative design released by a brand that prompted them to say, “What the heck were they thinking?” You can probably look at your own brand and ponder the same question: “What was I thinking?”
Taste aside, most marketing is ultimately measured not on aesthetics but on how well it motivates an action (what the audience wants to hear). Get enough action, and arguments about aesthetics will subside. It’s the classic argument of “data wins.”
But sometimes it doesn’t. That usually happens when a senior leader wants the design to look a particular way.
Design and performance both have a place
A time and place exist for prioritizing creative tastes over performance. For example, a brand should design a logo or visual representation of what the company stands for without consensus from the buying public. That creative strategy begins and ends with internal decision-makers. The only issue is who makes the final decision. (In When Harry Met Sally, Marie’s taste won, and the table was gone.) The brand’s goal should be to ensure that the person (or team) with the right “taste” makes the ultimate creative decision.
The flip side occurs when the brand designs visuals to convert customers or deepen engagement with audience members. Whether it’s an ad with “buy now” or “subscribe now” or social media image with “please give us feedback” or “comment below,” the brand wants the visuals to help persuade the audience to do something.
In this case, one could argue the brand’s taste doesn’t matter nearly as much as what motivates the audience. The brand’s goal is to make sure its creative decision-maker is someone (or a team) who can balance the company’s taste with what the audience will find most compelling.
The need for creative taste tests
Marketers often need to test this tension between brand taste and customer resonance.
My consulting team recently worked with an e-commerce company in the home design space. Much of its content features photos, videos, and images of the work done in homes by contractors and designers. The chief marketing officer adamantly insisted no people appear in any imagery. The format (social media, brochures, website, etc.) didn’t matter – he only wanted pictures of designs. This no-people creative preference became part of the brand guidelines.
One day, a new agency made a mistake. They didn’t review the brand guidelines and published content with images featuring people. The campaign outperformed similar campaigns by almost 1.5 times. Following that happy accident, the marketing team finally convinced the CMO to test social media imagery and found images with people alongside the designs scored exponentially higher in engagement and conversions than the no-people imagery…Read More