A variety of studies (e.g. here, and here) have shown that brands make foods taste better. Judgments about quality are influenced by price, image, and social status. Advertisers know this and treat the products of their clients as artifacts around which people have experiences that are central to their self image.
In fact, it has become almost a cliché to suggest that brands are a vocabulary through which consumers articulate an identity. So Coke lovers vs. Pepsi lovers, Denny’s vs Chili’s, McDonalds vs. Burger King are branding competitions through which corporations seek to cement loyalty through feelings of affiliation.
To be honest, I haven’t run into too many people who construct identities around Coke or McDonalds. “Identity” seems too comprehensive and profound a concept to be framed by something as trivial as a brand of soda or fast-food restaurant. Such preferences don’t tell us much about a person. Perhaps customers seek a congruence with their self image through brands rather than full blown identity.
But some consumer choices might tell us more about a person–Whole Foods customers, the allocation list for a Napa cult cabernet, buyers of Cristal Champagne (before Jay-Z’s well publicized boycott) might be more robust examples of branding as a life-style indicator.
Nevertheless, according to this research, people think of themselves as connected to certain brands in light of the image that brand projects–a kind of psychological oneness that creates a disposition to re-purchase the product and positively evaluate its quality.
If we refer to taste framed around brand loyalty as “moral taste” (because it invokes qualities of character or personality), the question is what role does mouth taste play if any? Clearly it must play some role. If Coke were to reduce the sugar in its recipe by half, customers would surely flee. Some minimal level of mouth taste must conform to expectations.
But this research seems to confirm that there are limits to the role of “mouth taste”. This reinforces the point I’ve made repeatedly that tastes are cognitively penetrable—our beliefs about what we are tasting strongly influence how we taste.
What conclusions can we draw about the potential for objectivity in matters of taste?
Food writer and philosopher Jeremy Iggers writes in lamenting his readers’ preference for chain restaurants:
What I want to suggest is that not only our tastes but our identity are shaped by our culture, and that as our culture evolves so do both our tastes and our means of articulating our identity. Within a given regime of truth it is possible to establish standards of taste, because they are common to people with a shared way of life.… In an important sense, the people who prefer branded food really do live in a different world.
According to Iggers, moral taste establishes the framework within which standards of taste are maintained. I guess the point is that fans of McDonalds can judge a well or poorly executed Big Mac, but cannot objectively evaluate a Whopper. Tastes are relative to our brand affiliations. Moral taste is in the driver’s seat. Mouth taste is a dependent variable.
But the problem I have with this hypothesis is that it doesn’t explain changes in taste. Embedded in the quoted paragraph by Eggers is the following sentence:
But there come times when a radical rupture takes place in what people value and how they construct their sense of identity.
Indeed. Tastes change, often rapidly and profoundly. But how can relativism explain such change? It would seem that in order to explain cultural shifts in taste we would have to posit individuals who break out of their routine paradigms and brand affiliations and make an independent judgment of quality.
This suggests that mouth taste is doing some of the work and can sometimes be more powerful than moral taste. The question is how we articulate standards of judgment in these cases—they cannot be merely the product of conventional frameworks.
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 