Customer Taste Is the Brief. Most Brands Miss It.

“The customer is always right in matters of taste” is not a customer service slogan. It is a strategic principle. It means that what your customer prefers, values, and responds to is the only brief that matters, regardless of what your internal team believes, what your agency recommends, or what won an award last year.

Most brands know this in theory. Very few act on it in practice. The gap between those two positions is where growth lives.

Where the Phrase Actually Comes From

The original phrase is usually attributed to retail pioneers like Harry Gordon Selfridge and Marshall Field in the early twentieth century. But the version that has survived and been most widely misapplied strips out the second half. The full principle is: “The customer is always right in matters of taste.” That qualifier changes everything.

It does not mean the customer is correct about facts. It does not mean you should build whatever a focus group requests. It means that when a customer tells you, through their behaviour, their choices, their complaints, or their silence, what they value, that signal takes precedence over internal opinion. Taste is not rational. It is not always articulable. But it is always real, and it is always the thing your brand is in the end being judged against.

Marketing has spent decades building elaborate frameworks to avoid sitting with that uncomfortable truth. Brand positioning decks, consumer insight reports, creative rationales, all of them can become sophisticated ways of telling yourself you understand the customer while actually substituting your own preferences for theirs.

Why Internal Conviction Is Not the Same as Customer Understanding

Early in my career, I sat in a brainstorm for Guinness at Cybercom. The founder had to leave for a client meeting and handed me the whiteboard pen. The internal reaction in the room was palpable. Nobody said it out loud, but the energy said: this is going to be difficult. I did it anyway. What struck me, working through that session, was how much of the conversation was about what the team found interesting rather than what a Guinness drinker on a Thursday evening in a pub in Leeds would find interesting. Two very different briefs.

That experience stayed with me. Not because of the awkwardness of the situation, but because I saw it repeat itself in almost every agency and client environment I worked in afterwards. Smart people, good instincts, genuine care for the work, and yet a persistent tendency to confuse internal enthusiasm with external relevance.

The problem is structural. Marketing teams are not the customer. They are educated, urban, digitally native, professionally interested in brands and communication. Their taste is calibrated by the industry they work in. A campaign that impresses the team may land with a thud in the market, not because the execution was poor, but because the brief was wrong from the start.

If you want to understand how this plays out in go-to-market strategy more broadly, the work I cover across Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy comes back to this problem repeatedly: the gap between what brands think they are offering and what customers are actually buying.

Taste Is Revealed in Behaviour, Not Surveys

One of the most persistent errors in customer research is treating stated preference as reliable data. When you ask someone what they want, they tell you what they think they should want, or what sounds reasonable, or what they think you want to hear. When you watch what they actually do, you get the truth.

I have sat through hundreds of client presentations where the research said one thing and the sales data said another. The instinct is often to trust the research because it feels more intentional, more deliberate. But behaviour is the market speaking without a filter. A customer who says they value sustainability but consistently buys on price is not lying. They are telling you something more nuanced: that sustainability is a preference when cost is equal, not a priority when it is not. That distinction matters enormously for how you position, price, and communicate.

Tools that capture real behaviour, session recordings, heatmaps, conversion path analysis, are closer to honest than any survey. Hotjar’s approach to behavioural feedback loops reflects this principle: the goal is to understand what users actually do, not just what they report. That kind of insight is more useful to a go-to-market team than a 40-slide research deck built on stated intentions.

The same principle applies to content. Video engagement data, scroll depth, click patterns, these are your customers voting with their attention. Vidyard’s analysis of why go-to-market feels harder points to exactly this: teams are generating more content than ever while customer attention is harder to earn, partly because the content is built around what the brand wants to say rather than what the audience wants to receive.

The Delight Compounding Effect

I have said this in various forms for years, and I will say it again here: if a company genuinely delighted its customers at every opportunity, that alone would drive growth. Marketing is often a blunt instrument deployed to prop up businesses with more fundamental issues. Acquisition spend compensates for churn. Brand campaigns paper over product problems. Promotions substitute for genuine value.

When a brand consistently delivers on what its customers actually value, the economics change. Word of mouth increases. Churn decreases. Lifetime value extends. The cost of acquisition falls because you are not fighting against your own reputation. None of this is romantic. It is commercially logical.

BCG’s work on commercial transformation in go-to-market strategy identifies customer centricity as a structural advantage, not a soft value. Brands that organise around genuine customer understanding outperform those that organise around internal capability or product features. That is not a new finding. It is just consistently ignored.

The compounding effect works in both directions. A brand that repeatedly misses on taste, that delivers experiences customers find frustrating, confusing, or simply indifferent, builds a reputation deficit that marketing spend cannot easily overcome. I have worked with businesses spending significant budgets on acquisition while their NPS scores were quietly telling them that every new customer they brought in was likely to leave within twelve months. The maths on that does not work, no matter how good your media buying is.

What “Matters of Taste” Actually Means for Go-To-Market Strategy

What “Matters of Taste” Actually Means for Go-To-Market Strategy

Taste, in the strategic sense, covers more than aesthetics. It includes the tone a customer expects from a brand. The level of friction they will tolerate in a purchase process. The degree of personalisation they find helpful versus intrusive. The price point that feels fair versus exploitative. The channel they prefer to be reached through. These are all matters of taste, and they are all things brands routinely get wrong by substituting internal assumptions for genuine customer signals.

When I was growing an agency from twenty people to over a hundred, one of the clearest lessons was that client retention was almost entirely a function of whether clients felt understood. Not whether we had done technically excellent work. Not whether our reporting was thorough. Whether they felt we had genuinely grasped what mattered to them, commercially and personally, and had organised our work around that. Taste, in this context, meant understanding what each client valued in an agency relationship, and delivering that rather than what we found most interesting to produce.

Go-to-market strategy has the same challenge at scale. You are trying to bring a product or service to market in a way that matches what a defined group of customers values. BCG’s research on pricing and go-to-market strategy in B2B markets makes the point that even pricing is a matter of taste in this sense: the same price point can feel fair or extortionate depending on how it is framed, what it is compared to, and what the customer believes they are receiving. That is not a pricing problem. It is a customer understanding problem.

The Feedback Loop Problem

Most organisations have feedback mechanisms. Very few have honest ones. The data that reaches decision-makers has usually been filtered, aggregated, and smoothed to the point where the signal has been lost. A customer who churned because the onboarding experience was confusing becomes a data point in a churn rate. A customer who never converted because the landing page messaging felt off becomes a bounce rate. The texture of the experience, the specific thing that did not match their taste, rarely survives the experience from customer to boardroom.

Building genuine feedback loops requires deliberate effort and a certain organisational willingness to hear uncomfortable things. I have been in client meetings where the customer insight was clear and the response was to question the methodology rather than sit with the finding. That is a very human reaction. It is also commercially expensive.

Tools like SEMrush’s overview of growth tools point to the range of instruments available for capturing customer signals across digital touchpoints. The technology is not the constraint. The constraint is organisational willingness to act on what the data says, especially when it contradicts the internal narrative.

Creator-led campaigns offer an interesting model here. When brands work with creators who have genuine audience relationships, they are effectively borrowing a trust and taste alignment that took years to build. Later’s work on go-to-market strategies with creators reflects this: the creator’s audience has already self-selected around a specific taste profile, and a brand entering that relationship is being tested against that taste immediately. There is no room for the internal conviction gap. The audience either responds or it does not.

When Brands Confuse Taste With Trend

One of the more reliable ways to misread customer taste is to chase trend signals without understanding whether they apply to your specific customer base. A format that performs well on TikTok for a Gen Z skincare brand does not automatically transfer to a B2B software company targeting procurement managers in their forties. The trend is real. The applicability is not.

I have judged the Effie Awards, which assess marketing effectiveness rather than creative quality alone. The campaigns that consistently perform well are not the ones that chased the most current format or platform. They are the ones that understood something true about their audience and expressed it in a way that resonated. Effectiveness and trendiness are weakly correlated at best.

The confusion between taste and trend is particularly acute right now. Every brand is being told to be on every platform, to produce short-form video, to use AI-generated content at scale, to personalise at the individual level. Some of that is relevant for some brands with some audiences. Most of it is noise. Customer taste does not change as fast as the industry’s enthusiasm for new formats does. The customer who valued clear communication, reliable delivery, and fair pricing five years ago probably still values those things. The channel through which they prefer to receive information may have shifted. The underlying taste has not.

Vidyard’s Future Revenue Report highlights an interesting tension in go-to-market teams: there is significant untapped pipeline potential, but teams are struggling to convert it. Part of that gap is a taste mismatch. The outreach, the content, the format, the timing, these are not calibrated to what the buyer actually wants to receive. More volume does not solve a taste problem. Better calibration does.

Applying the Principle Without Losing Strategic Nerve

There is a version of “the customer is always right” that becomes an excuse for strategic passivity. You do not build a brand by simply reflecting back whatever the customer says they want in a focus group. Customers cannot always articulate what would delight them before they have experienced it. The principle is not about asking customers to design your product or write your brief. It is about staying honest about what they actually value, as revealed by their behaviour, and building your strategy around that rather than around internal preference.

That requires strategic nerve. It means being willing to say, internally, that the campaign your team loves may not be the right one. That the product feature your engineers are most proud of may not be the one customers care about. That the channel your leadership is most comfortable with may not be where your audience is. These are uncomfortable conversations. They are also the conversations that separate commercially effective marketing from marketing as performance.

Managing hundreds of millions in ad spend across thirty industries taught me that the brands with the most efficient spend were almost always the ones with the clearest customer understanding. Not the biggest budgets. Not the most sophisticated attribution models. The clearest picture of what their specific customer valued and why. Everything else, the channel mix, the creative approach, the bidding strategy, followed from that.

If you want a broader framework for how customer understanding fits into growth strategy, the thinking I have developed across these articles on go-to-market and growth strategy keeps returning to the same point: the fundamentals are not complicated. They are just consistently avoided in favour of things that feel more sophisticated or more immediately measurable.

The Practical Implication

If you take one thing from this principle and apply it to your next planning cycle, make it this: before you brief your agency, before you set your channel mix, before you finalise your creative direction, ask yourself honestly whether you are building around what your customer values or around what your organisation finds comfortable.

Those are often different things. The customer who values speed and simplicity does not care that your brand has a rich heritage. The customer who values community and belonging is not impressed by your product specifications. The customer who values trust and reliability is not won over by your innovation narrative. Taste is specific. Strategy built on taste has to be specific too.

The brands that grow consistently are not the ones with the cleverest campaigns. They are the ones that have stayed closest to what their customers actually value and have had the discipline to organise everything around that, even when it meant overriding internal preference. That is not a marketing insight. It is a business insight. Marketing just happens to be the function best placed to keep making the case for 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.

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