Winning in the era of taste and talent

FastCompany: 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.

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The article addresses a significant shift in branding strategies towards authenticity and cultural resonance, which is highly relevant for brand strategy professionals navigating a competitive market.