ABSTRACT
This paper argues that in the current aestheticisation of everyday life, product taste is a significant factor incorporating embodied aesthetic experience, identity building and social display. Taste is a preference arising from the consumer’s value-based capacity to make distinctions between physical objects and to get pleasure from them. Understanding the background to consumer taste is necessary for the critical and insightful interpretation of so complex a phenomenon. Useful theories can be found in consumer research, marketing research, psychology, anthropology, semantics, the cognitive sciences, the sociology of taste, aesthetics and usability studies. On the basis of these different approaches, three categories of the practical aspects of consumer taste can be identified. These categories combine the boundaries and possibilities of the consumers’ use situation with their subjective aspirations and social interaction.
