Taste isn't everything.

You can't base currency off of vibes.

Unpopular opinion: taste feels like currency, but discernment is what actually spends.

Touch Grass is my Substack about early-stage ideas, brand clarity, and the creative murk in between—written with dirt under the nails. Subscribe for essays that blend strategy with story, business with backbone. If this is our first time meeting, I also write about nature and slow living over at Lowcountry, High Life.

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Taste isn’t the new currency

Every few months there’s a new crown jewel in the creative-business zeitgeist. A word that starts as an observation, gets passed around the internet as gospel, and ends up in a B2B marketing headline until it loses all meaning (womp). For a while it was all about the “vibes”, then we dove head-first into the depths of “escapism”, and now we’re starting to hear the whispers of “maxxing” niches, looks, and honestly anything that fits before a hyphen (is that “max-maxxing”?). But for right now, the word on everybody’s lips is “taste.”

In the brand and marketing world, taste is being hailed as the new currency. Gone are the days of measuring worth in impressions, click-throughs, and cost-per-whatevers. Today, the brands getting attention are the ones staking their value on aesthetic instinct and cultural alignment.

The brands who have taste know what to make before anyone else does.

The brands who have taste know where to show up — and just as importantly, where not to.

The brands who have taste don’t need to explain themselves; they signal and people just get it.

The brands who have taste will always stay ahead, because culture bends toward them.

The brands who have taste don’t follow metrics, they follow vibes.

But the more I hear it, the more hollow it sounds. Taste is real, sure. Taste matters. But taste is not currency. Not in the way people are making it out to be.

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Taste is slippery, and business hates slippery

Taste is, by design, subjective. It’s nothing more than recognizing your own preferences reflected back at you — in a moodboard, a space, a brand. That’s why it feels so magnetic when you encounter someone with “good taste.” It’s like you’re sharing a secret language, but that language isn’t universal.

The trouble with taste is that it doesn’t hold up under pressure. What looks like impeccable taste to me might look like over-designed fluff to someone else. And you can’t equate it with monetary value, either. Even in luxury circles, money does not equal taste (case in point: MacKenzie Childs—fight me).

And business, for all its faults, does not like playing in the subjective. You can’t run a company on vibes. Not when the cost of being wrong is measured in millions, not moodboards.

That’s where this whole “taste is the new currency” argument starts to collapse. Taste can spark interest. It can make something feel fresh. But it cannot, on its own, justify why one bet is worth taking and another isn’t. Let’s dive a bit deeper…

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What people actually mean when they say “taste”

I don’t think anyone actually wants to stake their business on taste alone. What they’re reaching for (and failing to name) is discernment.

Discernment is taste with teeth. It’s not just “I like this, I don’t like that.” It’s “I understand what this choice signals, what it borrows from, what it risks, and whether it will matter beyond the room we’re in right now.”

Discernment is:

1. History. Not just knowing what campaigns worked, but knowing which ones worked for five minutes and which ones bent culture for five years.

2. Context. Not just demographics on a slide, but understanding how a choice feels when it collides with the mood of the moment.

3. Signal-reading. The ability to catch the undercurrent before it breaks the surface, to notice when a fringe idea is about to flip mainstream.

4. Commitment. The discipline to stay the course even when someone in the boardroom raises an eyebrow—until the actual signal shifts.

Taste is what makes you stylish. Discernment is what makes you right more often than you’re wrong. And if there’s any currency in this game, it’s the latter.

But what about the gut?

Here’s where I don’t want to overcorrect: you can’t turn discernment into a neat, clinical science. Some of the boldest, most important brand moves work precisely because they went against all available signal.

Apple didn’t have a dataset that said people were craving candy-colored computers in the beige-box era. Nike didn’t have a market research slide that said “bet the brand on Colin Kaepernick.” Liquid Death didn’t follow a framework that concluded the best way to sell water was to market it like beer.

These were gut calls. But here’s the important thing: they weren’t just gut. They were risks informed by history, context, and conviction. The leaders making those calls weren’t acting on vibes alone — they had enough discernment to know when to ignore the signal, and enough courage to live with the fallout if they were wrong.

That’s the line. Not vibes versus spreadsheets, but intuition sharpened by knowledge.

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The real split: taste vs. discernment

Here’s how I see it:

• Taste without discernment is a Pinterest board with no budget attached—lots of aesthetic energy, zero direction.

• Discernment without taste is a quarterly roadmap no one wants to follow—technically correct, spiritually lifeless.

• Together, taste and discernment are the only combo strong enough to bend the market instead of begging it for attention.

Both are necessary. Businesses need creativity to see what doesn’t exist yet. But they also need strategy to decide whether building that world is worth the cost. One without the other is a dead end.

Taste imagines new worlds. Discernment decides which ones to bet on.

Taste without discernment is a moodboard that never leaves the room. Discernment without taste is a strategy deck that no one wants to live inside. But together — that’s when brands make moves that actually change culture, not just participate in it.

So no, taste isn’t the new currency. Taste gets you attention. Taste makes you look cool at the dinner party. But discernment — the ability to connect intuition to context, to make the leap and stand behind it — that’s what actually pays the bills.

Taste makes you a tastemaker.
Discernment makes you a leader.

And in business, leaders are the ones who last.

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P.S. If you liked reading this, do you mind tapping that heart just below? I’m a people-pleasing millennial and gold stars are my kink.