The Customer Is Always Right in Matters of Taste

“The customer is always right in matters of taste” is not a customer service policy. It is a strategic principle. It means that if enough of your customers consistently prefer something you would not have chosen for them, their preference is the market signal, and your opinion is the noise.

Most marketing organisations have this backwards. They treat customer feedback as something to be managed rather than something to be followed. They run focus groups to validate decisions already made. They optimise for what the brand team prefers and wonder why the numbers stay flat.

What Does “Always Right in Matters of Taste” Actually Mean?

The original phrase is commonly attributed to Harry Gordon Selfridge, the retail pioneer who built a department store empire on the idea that customers should be treated as guests rather than problems. The full version of the quote, the part almost nobody uses, is the important part. Not “the customer is always right.” That version has been used to justify everything from abusive returns policies to catastrophically bad product decisions. The qualified version, “in matters of taste,” is the one that actually holds up commercially.

In matters of taste means: when a customer consistently chooses one thing over another, their choice is the data. You do not get to overrule it with a brand guideline or a creative director’s instinct. You can try to shift it over time, through product development, through earned reputation, through genuinely better experiences. But you cannot market your way around a preference that is real and persistent.

I have spent time on the Effie Awards judging panel, and what separates the campaigns that actually work from the ones that just look good in a case study is almost always the same thing: the winning brands listened to something real about their customers before they built the campaign. Not a sanitised insight from a PowerPoint deck. Something that felt uncomfortable or counterintuitive or at odds with what the marketing team had been assuming.

Why Marketing Teams Struggle to Accept Customer Taste as Signal

There is a particular kind of organisational dysfunction that shows up in marketing departments of a certain size. It usually looks like this: the brand team has a clear point of view on what the product should mean to people. The creative team has built a visual and tonal identity around that point of view. The leadership team has signed off on it. And then the customers, apparently unaware of all this work, keep responding to something else entirely.

The response, in too many organisations, is to assume the customers are wrong. Or that they have not been educated yet. Or that the campaign just needs more reach. I have sat in those rooms. I have heard those conversations. And I have watched companies spend significant budget trying to convince customers to want what the brand team had decided they should want, rather than giving customers more of what they had already demonstrated they valued.

This is not a creative problem. It is a strategic one. It comes from conflating brand identity with market reality. Your brand can have a clear identity and still be wrong about what customers actually want from it. Those two things are not in conflict. Accepting that customers have preferences you did not design for is not a failure of brand management. It is just honest market reading.

Tools like Hotjar’s feedback and behaviour tracking exist precisely because what customers say in research and what they do in practice are often very different things. The behaviour is the truth. The stated preference is a starting point at best.

The Difference Between Taste and Opinion

Not everything a customer says should be treated as a strategic signal. There is a meaningful difference between taste, which shows up in consistent behaviour over time, and opinion, which shows up in surveys and focus groups and tends to reflect what people think they should say rather than what they actually do.

Early in my agency career, I was in a brainstorm for a major drinks brand. The founder had to step out for a client call and, almost as an afterthought, handed me the whiteboard pen. I was newer to the room than almost everyone else there. The internal reaction was not exactly warm. But what I noticed, sitting in that slightly uncomfortable position, was that the conversation kept circling back to what the brand wanted to say rather than what the drinker was actually doing. The drinker’s behaviour, the occasions, the rituals, the social context, was sitting right there in the research. Nobody was building the brief around it. They were building the brief around the brand’s preferred self-image.

Taste is what shows up in the data when you strip away what people claim to prefer and look at what they actually choose. It is the meal deal that outsells the premium option even when the margin story favours the premium. It is the product variant that cannibalises the hero SKU because customers just like it more. It is the email subject line that gets twice the open rate despite the copywriter thinking it was the weaker option.

Respecting taste means building strategy around those signals, not around the version of the customer you would prefer to be serving.

If you are thinking about how this connects to broader go-to-market strategy, there is more on that across The Marketing Juice’s Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, which covers how market signals should shape positioning, channel decisions, and growth planning.

How Ignoring Customer Taste Shows Up Commercially

The commercial consequences of overriding customer taste are usually slow-moving and therefore easy to misattribute. You do not lose customers overnight. You lose them gradually, to competitors who are paying closer attention, while your own metrics look acceptable enough that nobody sounds the alarm until it is expensive to fix.

I ran agencies through periods of significant growth and through periods of difficulty, and the pattern I saw most consistently in struggling client businesses was not bad marketing. It was good marketing applied to a product or experience that was not earning the loyalty it was trying to buy. The marketing was doing its job. The underlying business was not doing its job. And no amount of media spend closes that gap permanently.

BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy in financial services makes a point that applies well beyond that sector: understanding what customers actually need, as opposed to what the business assumes they need, is the foundational step that most organisations skip in their rush to get to channel and creative decisions. The result is a go-to-market plan built on an assumption rather than a signal.

When I was helping turn around a loss-making agency, one of the first things I looked at was the client retention data. Not the headline retention number, which looked reasonable on paper, but the pattern underneath it. Which clients were staying and growing? Which were staying but shrinking? Which were leaving, and when in the relationship were they leaving? The answers were almost always about whether the agency had been listening to what the client actually valued, or whether it had been delivering what the agency assumed the client should value. The distinction sounds subtle. The commercial difference was not subtle at all.

When Customer Taste Conflicts With Brand Strategy

This is where it gets genuinely complicated, and where a lot of strategic thinking goes wrong in both directions.

On one side, you have brands that follow every customer signal without any strategic filter, which tends to produce incoherent product portfolios and brand identities that mean nothing to anyone because they are trying to mean everything to everyone. This is not what “the customer is always right in matters of taste” means. It does not mean the customer designs your strategy for you.

On the other side, you have brands that treat customer taste as something to be overcome rather than something to be understood. These are the businesses that spend years trying to educate customers into preferring something the customers have already decided they do not prefer. This tends to be expensive, slow, and often unsuccessful.

The productive middle ground is treating customer taste as a constraint within which brand strategy operates, rather than either a mandate or an obstacle. Your brand can have a clear point of view. It can make choices that not every customer will agree with. But it should be making those choices with a clear-eyed understanding of what it is asking customers to accept, and what the commercial cost of that ask might be.

BCG’s analysis of pricing and go-to-market strategy in B2B markets is a useful reminder that even in contexts where brands have significant pricing power, that power is still in the end derived from what customers are willing to pay, not from what the business would like to charge. Taste, in that context, includes price sensitivity. And price sensitivity is one of the clearest expressions of what customers actually value versus what they are willing to tolerate.

What Genuinely Customer-Led Growth Looks Like in Practice

When I grew an agency from around 20 people to over 100, the growth did not come from winning pitches on the strength of our credentials deck. It came from clients who had been genuinely well-served telling other people about it. That is not a complicated insight, but it is one that most agency leaders I have met pay lip service to while spending most of their energy on new business rather than on the quality of what they deliver to existing clients.

Genuinely customer-led growth means that the product or service is doing enough of the work that marketing is amplifying something real rather than compensating for something absent. That is a different brief. It changes what you measure, what you optimise for, and what success looks like quarter to quarter.

It also changes how you think about channels. Brands that are genuinely earning customer preference tend to see stronger organic signals: better word of mouth, higher direct traffic, lower churn, longer customer lifetimes. These are not soft metrics. They are commercially meaningful, and they tend to show up in the P&L if you are looking for them. Growth tactics can accelerate this kind of momentum, but they cannot manufacture it from nothing.

Creator-led campaigns are an interesting case study in this. When a creator’s audience genuinely responds to a product, it is usually because the product is doing something real for people. The creator is not manufacturing preference. They are surfacing it. Later’s thinking on creator-led go-to-market campaigns touches on this dynamic: the campaigns that convert are the ones where there is genuine alignment between what the creator’s audience cares about and what the product actually delivers.

The version that does not work is the one where a brand pays for reach with a creator whose audience has no particular reason to care about the product, hoping that the association will manufacture preference. Sometimes it produces a short-term spike. It rarely produces the kind of durable customer relationship that shows up as growth over time.

The Strategic Implication for Go-To-Market Planning

If you accept that customer taste is a genuine market signal rather than something to be managed, it changes how you approach go-to-market planning in a few concrete ways.

First, it changes what you treat as a constraint versus what you treat as a variable. Your product’s strengths and weaknesses, as perceived by customers, are constraints. Your messaging and channel choices are variables. A lot of go-to-market plans treat these the wrong way round, trying to change perception through messaging while leaving the underlying product experience unchanged.

Second, it changes your sequencing. The question “what do we want customers to think about us?” should come after the question “what do customers currently think about us and why?” Not before. The gap between those two answers is where the strategic work lives. Forrester’s analysis of go-to-market challenges in healthcare is a useful illustration of what happens when companies sequence this the wrong way: they build market entry strategies around what they want the product to mean without adequately understanding what the market is actually looking for.

Third, it changes how you measure. If customer taste is the signal, then the metrics that matter most are the ones that reflect actual customer behaviour over time: retention, repeat purchase, share of wallet, organic referral. Not just acquisition metrics, which tend to measure how well your media budget is working rather than how well your product is working.

I managed hundreds of millions in media spend across multiple industries over the course of my agency career, and the honest observation is that a lot of that spend was doing more to capture existing demand than to create new preference. That is not a criticism of performance marketing. It is just an accurate description of what most performance marketing actually does. The brands that were genuinely growing, not just efficiently acquiring, were the ones where the product was doing something real enough that customers were arriving with some pre-existing intent rather than needing to be persuaded from a standing start.

There is more strategic thinking on how to build go-to-market plans that account for real customer behaviour rather than assumed customer behaviour across The Marketing Juice’s growth strategy section, including how to set objectives that reflect what the market is actually telling you.

The Honest Version of This Principle

The honest version of “the customer is always right in matters of taste” is not particularly comfortable for marketing teams, because it implies that a significant portion of what marketing does is compensating for decisions made elsewhere in the business. Pricing decisions. Product decisions. Distribution decisions. Customer service decisions. These all shape customer experience and therefore customer taste, and marketing rarely controls any of them.

What marketing can do is be honest about this dynamic rather than pretending it does not exist. A brand with a genuinely good product, fairly priced, well distributed, and backed by decent customer service, does not need to work as hard on marketing as a brand with a mediocre product trying to punch above its weight through media spend. That is not a controversial observation. It is just commercially true.

The implication for senior marketers is that the most commercially valuable thing you can sometimes do is tell the rest of the business what the customers are actually saying, even when that is not what the rest of the business wants to hear. That requires a degree of organisational courage that is not always rewarded in the short term. But it is what separates marketing that genuinely drives growth from marketing that just generates activity.

Customer taste is not a problem to be solved. It is a signal to be read. The brands that read it accurately, and build their strategy around what it is actually telling them, are the ones that tend to grow without burning through budget to do it.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions