What Is Taste in Branding? It’s Not What Most Agencies Think

Think about every person the world considers to have great taste. Steve Jobs. Anna Wintour. Virgil Abloh. Rick Rubin. Björk. Wes Anderson. Jony Ive. Prince. Toni Morrison. Joan Didion. Issey Miyake. What do they have in common?

Not a visual sensibility. Not cultural literacy. Not aesthetic range. What they have in common is an opinion. A specific, non-negotiable, unpopular-until-it-wasn’t point of view about how something should be.

Jobs’ opinion: simplicity is worth more than features. Morrison’s opinion: Black readers do not need white translation. Abloh’s opinion: streetwear and couture can coexist and each makes the other more interesting. Wintour’s opinion: fashion is serious and should be treated as such. Rubin’s opinion: the most important thing in the room is the song, and everything else is in service of it.

When people call these opinions “taste,” they are using a polite word for something with sharper edges. Taste is the socially acceptable version of the claim. Opinion is the actual thing. The two words describe the same phenomenon from different distances. Up close, it is an opinion — specific, arguable, sometimes divisive. From far away, once enough people have agreed, it looks like taste.

What Taste in Branding Actually Is

In branding, taste is not a visual sensibility. It is not a preference for a certain kind of typography, a mastery of colour relationships, or a sophisticated awareness of contemporary design movements. These are skills. They are trainable. They can be purchased. They are not taste.

Taste in branding is an opinion about what a brand should be and what it should refuse to be. It is the specific belief, held with enough conviction to act on under pressure, about what constitutes good work — and what falls short regardless of the client’s preference, the market’s trend, or the deadline’s demand.

The agency with taste says: a brand built on visual execution without strategic foundation is decoration, and we do not produce decoration. The designer with taste says: this concept is technically accomplished but it is not right, and technically accomplished is not enough. The brand director with taste says: that direction is safe and safe is the most expensive thing we can produce, because it will cost us the attention of every buyer who had exactly this much time to be interested and moved on.

These are opinions. Specific, defensible, capable of generating disagreement. When they are held consistently over enough work, over enough time, they produce what the outside world calls taste. When they are absent, what gets produced is technically competent and commercially inert.

How Taste Gets Mistaken for Something Else

Most agencies claim taste. Very few have opinions. The gap between those two things is the gap between agencies that produce work that is noticed and agencies that produce work that is technically adequate.

An agency that claims taste without an underlying opinion produces a different version of the same safe thing for every client. The portfolio is consistent in quality but inconsistent in point of view. Every piece reflects the brief, the budget, and the trend. Nothing reflects a position the agency took independent of what was asked for.

An agency with an opinion produces work that is recognisably from that agency across different clients, different sectors, different budgets. Not because they impose the same visual system on everyone, but because the same underlying belief about what a brand should be shows up in every decision about what to do and what to refuse. The portfolio is coherent not stylistically but philosophically. Your perspective is your product. The portfolio is evidence of what you believed was worth making.

How an Opinion Gets Developed

You cannot develop taste by studying design. You develop it by accumulating enough experience of the world — enough contact with things that work and things that fail, enough exposure to contexts that challenge your existing frame — to form a specific belief about how something should be done that the consensus has not yet arrived at.

The first requirement is living some life. You cannot have a relevant opinion about the world without experiencing enough of it to notice what is being missed. Travel. Work with people who do not look like you or think like you. Sit in rooms you were not originally invited into. Read outside your discipline. The designer who has only read design books has access to the same opinions as every other designer who read the same books. The designer who has read economics, anthropology, culinary history, and military strategy has access to pattern recognition that no amount of design education can produce.

The second requirement is finding the thing you believe that the consensus disagrees with. Not a contrarian position for its own sake, but the specific observation about how things work that is true and visible to you and has not yet been generally acknowledged. Jobs believed that most people did not actually want the features they said they wanted — they wanted the outcome the features were supposed to deliver, without the complexity. Morrison believed that literary value was not the same as universal legibility, and that Black literature did not need to be translated into a frame that white readers would recognise as sophisticated. These were not universally held views when they were first acted on. They became the benchmark for how an entire field understood what good work looked like.

The third requirement is making every decision based on that belief. An opinion is only an opinion if you act on it when it is inconvenient. The creative director who holds an opinion in a pitch meeting and abandons it when the client pushes back did not have an opinion. They had a preference. Preferences are social. Opinions are structural. The opinion either governs the decisions or it does not exist. An agency that can push back is worth more than a team that waits for orders, precisely because the capacity to push back is evidence that the opinion is real.

Taste in Branding Is a Client Selection Mechanism

There is a commercial consequence to having an opinion: it determines which clients work with you and which do not.

The agency without an opinion can work with anyone, because they have no position to conflict with. Every brief is accommodated. Every direction is executed. The portfolio grows in volume and narrows in distinction. The client who wants a creative partner finds a skilled execution vendor. The relationship produces good work in the narrow sense and forgettable work in the sense that matters.

The agency with an opinion attracts clients who have been looking for exactly that opinion. Not because they agree with it in advance — they often do not — but because they recognise that the agency has a position, and a position is what they have been unable to find. The brief they brought is not the question the engagement will actually answer, and the engagement will be better for that. The client who wants a recommendation rather than an execution finds what they were looking for. The client who wanted execution finds the process uncomfortable and self-selects toward somewhere more accommodating.

Both outcomes are correct. The opinion is the filter. The filter is what makes the portfolio coherent. The coherent portfolio is what looks, from the outside, like taste. Every engagement adds to the intellectual inventory. The opinion is what determines which inventory accumulates and which gets discarded.

History Is Written by the Winners: When the Audience Decides

Here is the objection that the opinion-as-taste argument has to answer: if taste is just the opinions the market happened to validate, then calling someone a visionary is retrospective. History is written by the winners. The people we celebrate as having taste are the ones whose opinions the audience chose. Which means taste, as a category, is partly determined by luck, timing, and social cascade — not purely by the quality or the conviction of the underlying opinion.

This is true, and the evidence for it is uncomfortable. Matthew Salganik’s Music Lab experiment gave different groups of participants access to the same songs, with one variation: some groups could see how many times each song had been downloaded by others. The result was striking. When social signals were visible, songs became hits largely through reinforcement — early random advantages compounded into dominance. The same songs ranked wildly differently across separate experimental groups. The implication: the market is not adjudicating quality. It is accelerating whatever gains early momentum, which has a significant random component.

The survivorship bias point follows directly. For every Jobs, there were probably hundreds of people with equally strong, equally specific, equally unpopular opinions that the market never validated. We do not write books about them. What we call “visionary taste” is filtered through audience selection, and audience selection is not a perfect signal of the underlying quality of the opinion. It is partly that, and partly timing, and partly who happened to encounter the work at the right moment.

The research on creative genius does find consistent patterns across the people who eventually get recognised — deep domain expertise before deviation, cross-domain exposure as the source of original insight, and the structural courage to keep acting on an unpopular belief under social pressure to abandon it. These patterns are learnable. But they increase the probability of recognition without guaranteeing it. The same opinion, five years earlier or five years later, lands differently. The same work, encountered by different early audiences, compounds differently. The trainable part is real. The audience part is not fully in your control.

The practical implication for branding is this: the work of developing and holding an opinion is the part you can do. Whether that opinion becomes what the market calls taste depends on factors that are partly structural. This is another argument for expressing the opinion publicly and consistently across as many contexts as possible — not because repetition alone creates taste, but because the probability that the opinion encounters the right audience at the right moment increases with every new surface it enters. The opinion that is never expressed never gets the chance to be validated. Differentiation is an outcome. So is taste. Both emerge from doing the work with conviction. Neither is guaranteed by it.

Taste Is Not Universal: Japan, America, and the Cultural Frame

One more thing the opinion-as-taste argument has to reckon with: what counts as a strong opinion varies by cultural context, and what the market validates as taste varies with it.

In Japan, taste in visual design has historically been identified with information density. The layered visual language of commercial signage, the kanji-packed packaging, the multiple competing elements that somehow cohere — this is not chaos in the Japanese visual frame. It is a specific aesthetic intelligence, built from a writing system that encodes meaning in symbol rather than phoneme, a physical context where space is constrained and information has to work harder per square centimetre, and a cultural relationship between text and image that does not mirror the Western distinction between them.

In the United States, taste has been heavily shaped by European modernism filtered through American commercial culture. The Bauhaus, Dieter Rams’ ten principles, the clean Swiss grid, and eventually Steve Jobs applying all of it to consumer technology: the dominant American design opinion became that less is more, that reduction is sophistication, that visual complexity is a failure of editorial judgment.

Both of these are strong opinions held with conviction that were validated by their audiences and hardened into convention. Neither is the universal standard. A Japanese designer looking at an American SaaS homepage might read the whitespace as emptiness — information withheld, opportunity wasted, a failure to serve the reader. An American designer looking at a Tokyo convenience store package might read the density as noise — competing claims, no hierarchy, a failure of communication. Both are applying a culturally specific opinion about what good design does, and calling their reaction a perception of quality.

What this reveals is that taste has no fixed content. It has a fixed mechanism: an opinion held with conviction, validated by an audience, hardened into convention through repetition. What the opinion actually says — whether it advocates for density or reduction, for complexity or clarity, for restraint or abundance — is determined by the cultural and historical context in which it is formed and tested.

The branding implication is direct. Taste in branding for a B2B enterprise buyer in Singapore is not the same thing as taste for a B2B enterprise buyer in Germany or Brazil. The visual and verbal register that communicates credibility, seriousness, and trustworthiness differs by market. The opinion that is genuinely diagnostic in one context may be genuinely wrong in another. This does not make the opinion framework less useful. It makes the research requirement more specific: the opinion has to be formed in response to the specific market the brand is trying to reach, not imported wholesale from a different cultural context and applied as if it were universal.

So What Is Taste?

Taste is the outcome of three things operating together: a strong, specific opinion held with enough conviction to act on under pressure; an audience that encounters the work at a moment when it is ready to validate the opinion; and a cultural context that makes the opinion legible and resonant rather than foreign and incoherent.

The first of these is trainable. The second is partly structural and partly luck. The third is a constraint to understand before forming the opinion, not a variable to ignore and hope for the best.

In branding, this means the work of developing taste is the work of developing a specific, defensible point of view about what a brand should be — one that is grounded in enough domain expertise to be worth holding, cross-pollinated from enough adjacent fields to be genuinely original, and calibrated to the specific cultural context of the market the brand is trying to reach. Then holding it. Then expressing it. Repeatedly, specifically, and without apology.

The people the world eventually calls tasteful are not the ones who knew the answer in advance. They are the ones who had a strong enough opinion to keep acting on it until the market caught up. Then the market called it taste and forgot it was ever a bet. Brand is the residue of signals. Taste is the residue of opinions expressed consistently over time until they become the standard against which everything else is measured.