Winning in the era of taste and talent

Perhaps the marketing word of 2026 is “taste.” Creators debate it on Tik Tok, 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