Perhaps the marketing word of 2026 is “taste.” Creators debate it on TikTok, tech founders claim to possess it, and the media can’t stop dissecting it. For something easier to recognize than define, taste has lately generated an extraordinary amount of discussion.
Hard to define and a capability of sorts, it is a combination of sensitivity, intuition and learned judgment. And we all know people who have it — whether seen in their living room, wardrobe, hanging on their walls, or coming out of their kitchen. It’s not just what they create, but how they combine things.
Yet in 2026, taste is increasingly framed as a business asset—a genuine competitive advantage. Strangely, some of its loudest advocates come from the very industries that helped flatten it in the first place: corporate tech.
Beyond the algorithm
In Filterworld (2024), Kyle Chayka argued that algorithms have become the invisible curators of modern life, influencing everything from our playlists and news feeds to our travel plans and restaurant choices. The result, he suggests, is a culture of passive consumption in which personal taste is flattened and individuality gives way to algorithmic sameness.
A lot has happened since then. Add to Algorithms another enemy of our time, AI-slop, and you have a population longing for something real, brought to them by a human, not a piece of code.
Enter “Taste” with a capital T, a knight in shining armor ensuring you won’t churn out the same stuff that makes you look like everyone else (see: Instagram coffee shops; Airbnb aesthetics; quiet luxury wardrobes; DTC wellness brands).
Taste Unpacked
Let’s unpack a few things about this much-hyped resource:
● Taste requires active interest and curiosity; in the same way that an individual’s taste is the output of knowledge of and participation in a topic; the same is true for brands.
● Taste is deeply tied to personal narrative; it is layered and nuanced and reflects its owner’s history; taste will show whether you are one or multidimensional.
● Taste is as much about saying no as it is about saying yes; just as we have grown to be able to identify AI-slop, so too will we learn to identify ‘taste-slop’ – things made to look tasteful but which are actually empty of thought.
● Taste is not fixed; it changes as you and the world around you change.
● Taste is paradoxical and counterintuitive; sometimes it’s bad taste we crave; and depending on the cultural mood, bad taste can suddenly become good taste.
These points are what makes it difficult to apply a very human attribute to areas such as business and marketing. Taste doesn’t operate like algorithmic attention, it can’t be bought.
Curators and thinkers
The popular arguments for taste also miss a bigger point. Beyond being framed as a guard against slop (which it is), taste should be celebrated as a driver of cultural literacy (a key ingredient in marketing today). AI is good at regurgitating versions of what already exists but great taste is built on anticipation of where culture is moving. That is why the most enduring figures in creative culture — people liek Jonathan Anderson, Rick Rubin and Miuccia Prada — are as much curators and thinkers as they are markers. The most inspirational brands and thinkers challenge us by showing what they’re interested in, often before we are comfortable with it.
The way we see taste now being discussed and deployed by brands, reminds us of how another growth lever — talent, including influencers, creators and celebrities – has been used in the past.
Last year, content on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram attracted more advertising income this year than content from traditional media companies and U.S. brands spent more than $1 billion on celebrity talent in 2025.
For many of them, it is the single biggest line item in their marketing budget. And for most of them, it did not work as hard as it should have. Not because they chose the wrong name. But because they used that name in the wrong way.
Navigating the talent equation — how to judge who is right for you and then deploy them effectively in your marketing — is a critical frontier many brands have yet to solve.
Most brands — still adopting an outdated media mindset — treat talent as a channel. But the best uses of talent don’t think of talent as a media, but rather a “transfer of meaning.”
Casting conversations often starts with the question: who is the most famous person our target audience follows right now? This question optimizes for reach, not alignment. And that attention usually benefits the celebrity more than the brand.
The better question is: what do we want to mean in culture and how can another person — creator, celebrity, face — connect with that meaning? This question optimizes for relevance, resonance, and long-term brand equity.
In this current marketing era, the seductive way out is to try to wield taste and talent with brute force — piggybacking on trending aesthetics and aligning with trending faces.
But the currency of this era is not reach, but rather cultural resonance. And resonance happens through attraction not force.
WHAT BRANDS NEED IN AN AGENCY PARTNER
This is a critical moment of flux — one might even say rupture — in the relationship between brands and their agency partners. Brands are increasingly bringing creative resources in-house and spending directly with media platforms; and legacy advertising companies evolve into tech consultants.
There is a huge focus on scale and efficiency. But what about creativity and consideration?
In an age that demands cultural fluency, with audiences seeking out brands that are able to demonstrate creative passions, businesses need a specific type of creative partner.
This creative partner can’t just make things that look great; they need to be more like that stylish friend who reveals the world to you, sharing their own passions and in turn helps you cultivate your own.
They will help you understand not just who to cast in your campaigns but who else you might partner with to launch new products and ideas.
They will help identify which rooms to enter and make sure to walk into the room with the right people.
And, importantly, this type of partner will go on the journey with you — because taste and talent are not blunt force instruments that solve problems quickly, they are delicate muscles that must be built over time.
