Building a Taste-Driven Organization
A Taste Gap In AI Marketing - Part III.
In Part 1, we diagnosed the crisis: your brand is dissolving. In Part 2, you trained your eye over 90 days. You learned to see craft. You built vocabulary. You curated your reference collection.
Now comes the hard part: getting your entire team to see what you see.
Because here’s the truth most CMOs won’t admit: your personal taste is worthless if your team ships without it. You can have the most refined aesthetic judgment in the industry, but if your content team produces five pieces a day and you only review one, you’re just watching the brand dissolve in slow motion.
The question isn’t “how do I develop taste?“ anymore. It’s “how do I scale taste across 10, 20, 50 people—while AI is multiplying our output by 100x?“
That’s what we’re solving in Part 3. Grab a hot drink, let’s begin.
I. Your role. Why Individual Taste Doesn’t Scale (And What Does)
You’ve trained your eye. You can walk into any piece of content and immediately spot what’s off-brand, what’s lazy, what’s mediocre, and what’s excellent.
Congratulations. You’re now the bottleneck.
Here’s what happens next in most organizations:
Week 1: You review everything. Quality goes up. Team gets frustrated with constant feedback.
Week 4: You’re spending 20 hours a week on reviews. Other work suffers. Team waits on your approval.
Week 8: You give up reviewing everything. Quality immediately drops. You review only “important” pieces. Everything else ships at whatever level the team thinks is acceptable.
Week 12: Your brand looks inconsistent again. The pieces you touched are great. Everything else is... not. This is the taste scaling paradox.
The more your eye develops, the more you see what’s wrong.
The more you see what’s wrong, the more you try to fix.
The more you try to fix, the more bottlenecked you become.
The more bottlenecked you become, the more stuff ships without your input.
You can’t review your way to brand coherence. So what actually works?
You build systems that embed your judgment into the organization. Not guidelines. Not rules. Not brand books. Systems that teach people to see what you see—and make decisions the way you’d make them. Here’s how.
II. The foundations. Setting Organizational Taste.
Principles Over Guidelines
Brand guidelines fail because they’re prescriptive. “Use this font.“ “Don’t use these colors.“ “Maintain 2:1 ratio of image to text.“ Guidelines tell people what to do.
They don’t teach people how to think.
Taste-driven organizations run on principles. Principles are different. They teach judgment, not compliance. Here’s the difference in practice:
Guideline: “All headlines should be under 60 characters and include a clear benefit.”
Principle: “We write headlines for busy executives who skim. If they only read the headline, they should understand the value. Test: Can you cut this headline in half and still convey the point?”
The guideline creates a checklist. The principle creates a decision-making filter.
How to build principles instead of guidelines?
Start with your “What We Are / What We’re Not“ framework.
Take your reference collection from Part 2. For each example in your “North Stars” section, ask:
What makes this work?
What principle is it demonstrating?
How would I explain this choice to someone who doesn’t see it?
Then flip it. For each example in your “Not This” section, ask:
Why is this off-brand for us?
What principle would prevent this?
How would I articulate why we don’t do this?
Document 5-10 core principles. Not 47. Not a 40-page brand book. Five to ten statements that capture how you make aesthetic decisions. Example principles (these are illustrative, yours will be different):
Restraint over abundance. When in doubt, remove. White space is a choice, not empty space.
Precision over poetry. Every word should earn its place. Cut the adjectives. Keep the insights.
Tension over harmony. We create visual interest through contrast, not through matching everything to brand colors.
Commitment over hedging. We pick a direction and execute it fully. No “edgy but also corporate-safe.“
These principles become your team’s decision-making filters. When someone asks “should we add another CTA button?“, the answer isn’t “check the brand guidelines.“ It’s “what does ‘restraint over abundance’ tell you?“ That’s how judgment scales.
Who Has Veto Power (And Why This Matters)?
Let’s talk about the thing nobody wants to address: who gets to say “this isn’t good enough“? In most organizations, the answer is fuzzy.
The designer thinks they own visual decisions.
The copywriter owns messaging.
The product marketer owns positioning.
The CMO reviews “important” stuff.
The result? Nobody owns aesthetic coherence. Taste-driven organizations are clear about approval architecture. You need someone with final say on whether work meets your standards. Not everything needs approval, but someone needs the authority to pull work that doesn’t hit the bar—even if it’s “on strategy” or “the data looks good.”
This is typically:
For smaller teams: The CMO or VP of Marketing (you)
For larger teams: A Creative Director or Brand Lead who’s completed the Part 2 training and has demonstrated judgment
The critical thing: this person needs actual authority. Not “provide feedback” authority. Kill-the-work authority. Because if your taste council can only suggest changes that product marketing can ignore, you don’t have a taste council. You have a suggestions box.
How to make this work without creating bottlenecks?
Build tiers of review based on visibility and risk:
Tier 1 - High visibility, external-facing: Homepage, brand campaigns, keynotes, major launches → Full taste review required
Tier 2 - Medium visibility: Regular emails, social posts, blog posts → Spot-check reviews (sample 20% weekly)
Tier 3 - Low visibility, internal: Internal decks, draft documents, working materials → Team self-evaluates using principles
The goal isn’t to review everything. The goal is to create enough checkpoints that quality becomes the expectation, not the exception.
