Bad Things, Good Business | Patti Williams

Why Do People Like Bad Things?

Dan Loney: Why is it that we tend to like things that may be perceived to be bad for us, or maybe things that the public at large doesn’t like, whether it be a TV show or a song? Well, some research has taken a look as to why there are times when we like things that maybe aren’t the best. Patti Williams is a marketing professor and vice dean here at the Wharton School, and she joins us here in studio. Patti, this has got to be one of those fun research topics to look at, because it’s so interesting?

Patti Williams: Yeah, it’s such a fun project. Thank you for having me here to talk about it, Dan. I’m going just give a shout out. This work was done with two Wharton doctoral students who’ve now gone on, and they are professors of marketing at USC and at the University of Colorado.

This project really came about because we were discussing, why do people like things like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room? People aren’t supposed to like bad things. They know it’s bad. It’s not like they think it’s good. Everybody knows it’s bad, and yet they still like it. We started thinking about this and looking into the research. And what we found is there really wasn’t any research that articulated or even discovered that people might like things that they themselves objectively find poor quality, let alone explaining why that might happen. So, we set about trying to understand what might be driving this.

Loney: When you say bad for us, what exactly do you mean?

Williams: We really mean things that you know are bad. Not things that maybe you think are bad, but I think are good, so I like them. But within my own range of preferences, I could choose to hear a really good joke. I could choose to hear a mediocre joke. Or I could choose to hear what is a really bad womp-womp joke. And what we find pretty consistently is what I’m going to call a J-shaped pattern. In general, people prefer the best things over mediocre or bad things. But what we find also is that, in general, people prefer bad things over mediocre things. So I’d rather hear a bad joke than just an in-between joke. But of course, I’d rather hear a good joke most of all.

Labubu Dolls, Retail Fads, and Personal Taste

Loney: There are elements of this that you connect to the retail sector.

Williams: Oh, absolutely. In fact, one of the biggest trends right now, I think, is an example of so bad it’s good. I don’t know, do you have a Labubu doll?

Loney: I do not, but I have heard about them, yes.

Williams: I don’t have one either, but I keep seeing them. And now that the students are back on campus, I’ve noticed several hanging from backpacks as they’re walking through campus. I think Labubu is so bad, it’s good, right? They’re these slightly ugly, mischievous but charming little things. Why do we like them? I don’t know, just because they’re a little bit crazy and a little bit out there. And they’re kind of fun to explore their eccentricities and maybe a little bit of the collector culture that comes in, too.

Loney: How do you think this type of attitude by the consumer impacts the companies that are producing the product or the song that maybe is not perceived by everybody to be the best?

Williams: I do think there are some organizations that understand that this is happening. I’ll give you an example. One of the studies that’s reported in the paper — and we ran many, many more studies that aren’t actually reported in the paper — was looking at people’s enjoyment of auditions from So You Think You Can Dance. What we found is that people really love the best auditions. And they love the worst auditions.

I think shows like that really know that that’s the case. They show you some really good ones, and they show you a few really, really bad ones, where the person who’s auditioning is really trying. There’s an earnest sincerity about it, but they’re just not really good. They tend not to show us very many mediocre ones. So, I do think there are organizations that understand that there’s this desire for badness. That if they pitch it the right way, they can tap into it and find consumer demand and consumer fandom, and maybe a little bit of virality, too.

Loney: But using the Labubu doll example, when you think about retail, isn’t there kind of a historical pattern? You will see companies come up with these items that you would think have no real connection. But for some reason, there’s a virality to them, and it just connects with a group of consumers.

Williams: Yeah. I think what you’re also suggesting is that sometimes so-bad-it’s-good phenomena become fads. Right? They suddenly burst onto the scene. Everybody has to have one. They become social, cultural capital as well. They create a sense of community or shared storytelling. Those kinds of things definitely happen. But I do think sometimes fads aren’t always so bad they’re good, right? There are lots of fads that are just good, not necessarily bad. I do think there’s a long-running history of these, maybe even going back to my childhood with the pet rock, which may be so bad it was good in the same way.

Loney: You talk in the paper about the importance of quality in making these decisions. Explain that.

Williams: Yeah. We really mean a couple of things. One is that we’re not looking at things that you might think are bad, but which I think are good. We’re looking at my own objective sense of quality. I really am choosing something that I think is not very good, but consuming that not very good thing is pleasurable in and of itself. The other thing we look at in the paper is, when and why might people make these kinds of choices? We don’t always choose the bad thing. We often choose the good thing instead. And we find that you’re more likely to choose something that’s so bad it’s good when you’re consuming for hedonic motives, rather than utilitarian motives. You don’t want a bad vacuum, you want a good vacuum. But you’re willing to watch a bad movie, maybe over a mediocre movie, right? A more hedonic motive, a more entertainment motive, lends itself to this kind of consumption.

Loney: Is it safe to say that the decision to like it is very individual to that person?

Williams: Yes and no. We definitely found some things that we could reliably get most everybody in the study to think they were so bad they were good. We could find So You Think You Can Dance auditions that everybody agreed were bad, but deeply entertaining. We could find jokes that everybody said, “Man, that’s the worst dad joke I’ve ever seen, but it still made me laugh.”

But it’s also the case that one of the things we discovered is that the things that you think are so bad they’re good might look different than the things that I think are so bad they’re good. There is a lot of heterogeneity in what counts as so bad it’s good. It’s not here in the paper, but we also think that there’s a lot of social capital. Subgroups might decide that this is an example of something that’s so bad it’s good, whereas another subgroup really doesn’t agree with that at all. I just think it’s bad. I don’t think there’s any goodness to it. Right? It’s a little bit of an individual difference and a little bit of a socio-cultural difference that sits there too.

The Mindset Behind “So Bad It’s Good”

Loney: You mentioned this in the scope of the entertainment industry. Is there something that connects us to this mindset within entertainment? It seems like entertainment would have maybe the greatest opportunity to see this play out.

Williams: Yeah, absolutely. And I would say that’s true both intentionally and inadvertently. I think some of these things, like Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” was intended to be good. And it turned out that people were like, “Wow, this is bad, but I love it.” I think it goes back to the motives that people bring to so-bad-it’s-good consumption that seems to align with entertainment-related consumption. People are in a hedonic mindset versus a utilitarian mindset.

Now, we looked at this with something like a documentary. People don’t want to watch a bad documentary. They’d rather watch a mediocre documentary than a bad one. A bad one is just bad. When I have a more utilitarian motive versus a hedonic motive, I’m just more interested in goodness than badness. When I’m more interested in pleasure or just having fun —and importantly, when the consumption of it is pretty inconsequential. It’s not going to ruin my life, it’s not going to cost me a lot of money. There’s not a lot of risk associated with it. I think that’s why you see it in the realm of entertainment. It’s an hour on TV, or 10 minutes on YouTube. Or a couple of days of reading a book. It’s costless, in some way.

Loney: I was going to say, it’s probably a minute on Instagram or X, or one of those platforms, because it goes back to the virality of it. With us having such a connection on social media to all of these different things, and posts being up there all the time, I would think, that there’s an opportunity to expand so bad it’s good even further.

Williams: Yeah, I think that’s right. It won’t surprise me to see that a lot of so-bad-it’s-good things are really viral. I think they’re also really relevant to the moment. I’ve been reading a lot about meta-modernism. It’s a response to postmodernism and the cynicism of postmodernism. And it’s really, really relevant to our students at the moment. I find them walking in with what I will call a meta-modern sort of perspective. Meta-modernism is this oscillation between hope and irony, and a recognition that things can bring both of these things. It comes with this deep desire for authenticity, but also a little bit of that postmodern cynicism that the world really isn’t all that we thought it might have been.

I think that a lot of these so-bad-it’s-good things sit right in this space. There’s the irony of, this thing is terrible. But there’s some earnest sincerity in its creation. It’s got its own charm. So, I think that the idea of so bad it’s good has a lot of cultural resonance at the moment, and is likely to be associated with things that just catch fire in culture.

Loney: I saw that you mentioned, after being involved with the research, that there were a few questions left to be answered. What areas?

Williams: This paper ultimately got published with just a handful of the studies and the kinds of mechanisms we looked at. Here, we looked mostly at entertainment value. We also had some studies where we looked at curiosity, and we definitely find that sometimes people are more curious about bad things. What is it that makes it bad? In what way is it bad? And so maybe there’s a curiosity mechanism that sits here.

We think that maybe there’s some storytelling value with things that are bad. You know, what am I going to tell you about this mediocre hamburger that I just ate? But there’s a great story to tell about the worst hamburger I ever ate in my life, right? There might be other drivers besides hedonic motives or entertainment value that drive this kind of behavior.

And then I think there’s some interesting questions around the role of irony. What does irony play here? Am I consuming something like a Labubu for its ironic factor? There is a little bit of research on ironic consumption. How does this differ from just consuming the irony of this thing. So many, many other things that I hope other people might pick up and investigate.