Taste Is a Strategy: How the Best Brands Make Decisions Faster

I used to think “speed” was mostly a process problem - shorter timelines, fewer meetings, tighter sprints. Then I spent a week at Cannes Lions and watched something else happen in real time: the people producing the strongest work weren’t moving fast because they were inherently quicker. They were moving fast because they were clear.

In one session at the Creative Academy, James Herman shared an insight that stayed with me long after Cannes: companies that commit to creative intelligence and excellence don’t just make better work, they tend to see materially stronger financial outcomes. I went home, bought his book The Case for Creativity, and read it like a playbook. What struck me wasn’t only the argument for creativity; it was the mechanism behind it. When a team has a well-defined sense of what “excellent” looks like, it stops renegotiating taste from scratch every time a decision appears. It doesn’t mean they stop debating; it means they stop debating the wrong things.

That’s what I mean by taste as a strategy. By taste, I don’t mean personal preference or surface-level styling. I mean a refined, intentional point of view that makes decision-making easier.

Taste is the internal compass that lets a team look at two perfectly acceptable options and immediately know which one is right.

It’s what helps them cut through debates that drag on for weeks, align cross-functional teams without death-by-committee, and protect coherence even as they scale. In a world where “good enough” is increasingly cheap and increasingly abundant, taste becomes a competitive advantage because it turns selection into speed.

This matters more now than it did even a few years ago because the cost of making is collapsing. AI can generate ten ad concepts, fifty taglines, a hundred landing page variants, and a dozen UI directions in minutes. The bottleneck is no longer production; it’s judgment. When everyone can produce competent work, the differentiator becomes the ability to curate, combine, and elevate into something that feels inevitable.

Taste becomes the moat not because it’s rare as an aesthetic, but because it’s rare as an organisational capability.

I think about this in the simplest way: when the room is full of options, what makes a decision fast is not more options, it’s a shared standard. Taste-led organisations don’t move quickly because they skip steps; they move quickly because they know what they’re aiming for. They can eliminate the non-essential without guilt. They can resist the urge to add “just one more thing” for safety. They can choose coherence over compromise and stay distinctive rather than slowly blend into the category.

Apple is the obvious reference point here, not because everyone should copy Apple’s minimalism, but because Apple demonstrates how a taste system makes speed scalable. Apple’s strength has always been coherence: products, software, retail, packaging, typography, motion; everything feels like it belongs to the same world. That coherence isn’t the result of more process; it’s the result of a point of view that has been made explicit and repeatable. When design principles are internalised, teams don’t need ten stakeholders to decide whether something feels on-brand. They can feel it. The debate becomes less about “do we like it?” and more about “does it belong?” That distinction is everything. It replaces endless subjective arguments with a shared filter, enabling faster decision-making without sacrificing quality.

‍

Taste also enables what I think is the most underrated form of speed: ruthless subtraction.

Anyone can generate options; taste-driven teams are good at removing what doesn’t matter. They cut features that dilute, words that clutter, visuals that distract. They don’t confuse more with better. On the surface, this can look like “minimalism,” but strategically it’s focus: a refusal to spend time building things that won’t make the experience meaningfully stronger. Subtraction is a discipline, and discipline is what keeps a brand coherent when the organisation grows and the number of voices multiplies.

One of the most useful frames I heard at Cannes came from Jason Bagley, founder of the Audacious School of Astonishing Pursuits. He broke great work down into three ingredients: a unique and surprising concept (two or more things combined in a new way), something that is extremely something (pushed to the edge of madness), and great story structure. Then he said a line that felt like a direct antidote to corporate decision-making:

“There are plenty of people to make the work safe; your job is to make it dangerous. If you’re only building what you think the client will buy, you’ll never make truly creative work.”

That’s taste, operationalised. Not recklessness for its own sake, but the courage to choose a sharper direction early, before the room dilutes it into “safe.” In a world where AI can hand you fifty decent ideas in a minute, “decent” isn’t the achievement. The achievement is recognising the one idea that has energy and committing to it. Taste is the faculty that tells you which concept is genuinely surprising, which execution is genuinely extreme in the right way, and which story structure will actually land with humans. It helps you make the dangerous choice before you have the data to justify it, because you understand what your audience will feel.

Stripe is a great case study for how taste becomes a decision engine rather than a design layer. Stripe’s brand has always been built on craft, not just in visual design, but in how it communicates and behaves. It treats quality as a product feature and clarity as a form of respect. That sensibility shows up in the calmness of its interfaces, the precision of its language, and the consistency of its experiences across touchpoints. The strategic benefit is that coherence saves time. Fewer arguments about tone. Fewer debates about visual direction. Fewer rewrites. When the organisation shares a standard of craft, people don’t have to justify why something feels off; they can spot it, and they can fix it.

This is where taste and data need a truce. Taste isn’t anti-data; it’s anti-overreliance. Data can tell you what happened. Taste often tells you what should happen next before the metrics fully catch up. In practice, the best brands use data to validate and iterate, but they don’t outsource their point of view to dashboards. If you only build what tests best in the short term, you often end up sanding off the very edges that made you distinctive. Taste protects those edges. It keeps you from optimizing yourself into interchangeability.

Airbnb’s 2014 rebrand is a useful example of taste functioning as strategic clarity, not decorative polish. Most people remember the logo. The more meaningful move was the decision to organise the brand around a single idea strong enough to shape everything else: belonging. That kind of central idea becomes a filter, and filters create speed. When you have an organising principle, decisions become easier: does this feature reinforce belonging, or does it feel transactional? Does this campaign invite people in, or does it sound like a booking platform?

Taste here isn’t just aesthetic; it’s narrative coherence. Coherence is what makes a brand legible at scale, and legibility is what reduces internal debate because you’re not improvising your identity every quarter.

If Apple and Airbnb are examples of taste as coherence, Linear is an example of taste as operational behaviour. Linear’s product feels fast, not because it claims speed, but because the experience is designed around speed as a belief: consistent patterns, minimal friction, and an obsession with the “small things” that accumulate into flow. The strategic point isn’t that every product should look like Linear. It’s that taste can be embedded in systems, in default choices and interaction patterns, so teams can ship quickly without constantly reiterating principles. When a company’s standards are encoded into the product language, decision-making accelerates because people aren’t debating from zero; they’re extending a system.

A24 shows another dimension of taste: curation. A24’s identity comes less from any single film than from the pattern of choices it makes, what it selects, supports, and markets. Over time, the audience learns to trust that editorial judgment. “An A24 film” signals a sensibility even when the films vary wildly. That trust compresses decision-making for the consumer: people watch faster, share faster, show up faster, because the brand’s taste has become a shortcut. The same is true internally. When your identity is built through consistent curation, you don’t need to chase everything. You can pick. You can be specific. You can say no quickly.

This is what makes taste strategic rather than aesthetic. It reduces uncertainty. It speeds up decisions without lowering the bar. And it becomes more valuable as the world fills with competent, generic outputs.

The cost of having no taste isn’t merely “bad design.” It’s incoherence, and incoherence is expensive.

Without taste, teams default to copying competitors because there’s no internal point of view. They over-index on metrics because they don’t trust judgment. They bloat products and campaigns because they can’t prioritise. They take longer to decide because everything becomes debatable. The result is work that looks fine in isolation but doesn’t add up to a distinctive brand. And in an era where “fine” is cheap, fine is a fast route to irrelevance.

Taste, by contrast, is how the best brands move quickly while staying themselves. It’s how they protect distinctiveness while scaling. It’s how they make fewer, better decisions, with less friction and more confidence.

In a world flooded with “good enough,” taste is the strategy that makes “exceptional” repeatable.

‍