We’ve outsourced taste – and the soul of branding is up for debate

Taste used to be the final mystery.

In boardrooms and studios, in late-night Slack threads, taste was the sacred thing you couldn’t quite prove but everyone chased. The sixth sense of the creative director, the sigh of approval from a good client, the designer’s instinct to nudge something two pixels to the left because it just felt better. Taste was the unspoken magic in branding. You had it or you didn’t. It couldn’t be taught. It certainly couldn’t be measured.

Until now.

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Today, we A/B test everything from headlines to unsubscribe buttons. We ask ChatGPT for ten versions of the same copy and run with the one that gets the most clicks. We plug images into Midjourney and choose the one that “performs” best. The algorithm tells us which layout drives the most conversions. Not the one that moved you. Not the one with soul. The one that worked.

And just like that, taste isn’t the final mystery anymore. It’s just a variable to optimise.

We’ve outsourced taste to the machine. Not because we had to. But because it’s easier. Because taste is slow, subjective, sometimes even wrong –  the kind of wrong that bets on feeling over fact. Whereas performance? Performance has a dashboard. It has line graphs. Taste never had those.

It’s tempting to see this as progress. And in many ways, it is. Why gamble on the creative director’s mood when you can launch with data? Why trust your gut when the machine can scrape the guts of a million users and tell you exactly what colour makes them click?

But something’s shifting. Quietly. Profoundly. The soul of branding, once about persuasion, charm, and connection, is being compressed into conversion metrics. If it doesn’t perform, it doesn’t exist. If it isn’t tested, it isn’t real.

We are training a generation of marketers to trust dashboards over instincts. To build brands not for what they feel like, but for what they output. The perfect brand isn’t the one that stays with you. It’s the one that clears the funnel. The one that makes people talk. 

The result? Brands that all look the same. Sound the same. Optimised into sameness. Monochrome, safe, focus-grouped to oblivion. Step out of line, and the branding pundits are ready with their pitchforks – and benchmarks.

Taste was flawed. But taste had tension. Taste had humanity. And the best brands in the world were born from it.

So what if we didn’t throw it out? What if we learned to hold the contradiction? To build with both metrics and messiness. To recognise that not everything valuable can be plotted on a chart. That the long-term equity of resonance, affinity, and distinctiveness doesn’t always show up in a heatmap.

Because good taste isn’t elitist. It’s not the preserve of the creative director in a black turtleneck. It’s simply the ability to sense what resonates. What lasts. What elevates. It’s a trained eye, a curious mind, a felt response. And yes, it’s slippery. But that’s why it matters.

Outsourcing taste might make branding easier.

But keeping it? That might be what makes it worth doing at all.