Taste Is a Competitive Advantage

When you move into a new home, it's a huge adjustment. When you move into a new home in a new marriage, not only is it an adjustment, but you're also likely bringing in different furniture, lifestyle accoutrements, and various ideas and expectations of what this new space will offer your new family environment.

Luckily, I'm the "vision" person in my marriage, while my husband is more the "execution" powerhouse. Between the two of us, we have a pretty good partnership dynamic. I come up with the ideas for a room aesthetic, and he paints, builds, or affixes art to the walls in alignment with those ideas.

As we cobbled things together, room by room, we were both concerned about the cost of furnishing a house twice the size of either of our previous homes. But as I worked through my ideas and plans, I realized I could do specific things to bring rooms together that didn't break the bank. We did a lot of thrifting, and stripping and painting furniture. I bought interesting fabrics and framed them as art. I stalked sales. Some of our favorite pieces cost next to nothing, but they fit exactly what we were trying to create.

Once people started coming over, they’d comment on the aesthetic and how much they enjoyed being here. It had just enough quirk to feel original, enough modernity to feel current, and enough warmth to make people want to stay awhile.

It occurred to me, after all of the careful picking and painstaking work, that taste is a refined skillset all by itself. Some people have good taste, and some people have expensive taste. Those two things aren’t the same, though they certainly can overlap.

People with expensive taste are often label hounds. They buy pieces because of the brand name attached. Their homes are perfectly coordinated because someone else already made the design decisions for them. They buy the showroom. They go for the Better Homes & Gardens look. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. It's functional. It's fast. But it can be expensive.

People with good taste, however, can walk into a thrift store, find something unexpected, modify it a bit, and somehow it fits perfectly. Good taste begins with a feeling or an intention. You walk into a room and ask yourself, "How do I want to feel when I'm here?" Then, piece by piece, you build toward that feeling. The larger decisions establish the direction. The smaller decisions reinforce it.

Good taste isn't really about money. It's about judgment. It's knowing what belongs, what doesn't, and when something feels just a little off, even if it's objectively beautiful.

As a marketer, I think a lot of organizations wrestle with this same concept of taste. Not just visually, but in their demand generation strategies, messaging, and activation.

A lot of companies spend top dollar with top vendors. They receive polished writing, beautiful creative, impressive presentations, and sophisticated campaigns. But sometimes the vibes are off.

The execution may be technically excellent, yet something doesn't quite fit the audience, the brand, or the buying journey. As a marketer, you usually know it in your gut when a recommendation feels out of bounds, even if you can't immediately articulate why.

The best marketing, before all, starts with intent.

Who is my audience?

How do I want them to feel after engaging with this?

What do I want them to understand?

What do I want them to do next?

Once those questions get answered, the strategy and tactics sharpen. Intention creates sharper messaging and stronger, more cohesive creative. Campaigns feel connected. The execution becomes easier because everyone is building toward the same basic objectives.

Cohesive and intentional planning matters even more in today’s B2B marketplace.

Buyers have more information than ever before. They're overwhelmed with content, skeptical of marketing, and under pressure to make smart decisions. Marketing budgets face greater scrutiny, and every touchpoint in the buyer journey is expected to prove its value.

The companies that succeed aren't necessarily the ones spending the most money. They're the ones making better decisions. In other words, they have good taste.

That's why I think finding the right marketing partner is less about finding the biggest name or the flashiest presentation and more about finding someone with good marketing taste who understands how modern buyers actually behave. Someone who knows when to lean into research, when to create authority, when to build trust before asking for action, and when to resist adding another tactic simply because it's trendy.

At Energize Marketing, that's always been our philosophy. We don't believe demand generation starts with channels or campaigns. It starts with understanding people. Through original research, audience intelligence, editorial expertise, content strategy, and measurable demand programs, we help organizations create experiences that feel intentional from beginning to end. Every webinar, research report, article, campaign, and activation should serve a purpose and move buyers naturally toward the next step.

Good marketing, much like good design, rarely comes from buying the most expensive pieces.

It comes from having a clear vision, making thoughtful decisions, and assembling every element with intention until everything simply feels right.