The hardest thing to find in marketing isn’t technical skill. It’s taste.
You can teach someone to run a paid media campaign, build an email sequence, or analyze a funnel. The tools change every eighteen months anyway — what matters isn’t mastery of any particular platform but the ability to learn new ones quickly. You can train processes, frameworks, and workflows. What you can’t easily teach is the instinct for what’s good — the ability to look at a piece of work and know, before any data comes back, whether it’s going to resonate or fall flat.
Taste is what separates the marketer who produces competent work from the one who produces work that moves people. It’s not about aesthetics, though aesthetics are part of it. It’s about judgment — knowing when a headline is sharp enough, when a design is clean enough, when a strategy is focused enough. Knowing when to stop.
What taste actually looks like in practice
People with taste notice the details that others skip. They catch the awkward phrase, the misaligned spacing, the off-brand image that’s “close enough.” They’re bothered by mediocrity in a way that’s genuinely useful — because that discomfort drives them toward better work.
A McKinsey study on the business value of design found that companies in the top quartile of design performance outperformed industry benchmarks by as much as two to one. But the report isn’t really about design in the visual sense — it’s about the organizational commitment to quality at every touchpoint. It’s about taste, scaled.
This quality is hard to screen for in interviews. It doesn’t show up on a resume. You can’t test for it with a case study exercise, because case studies reward strategic thinking, and taste is something different. Taste is what happens after the strategy is set and the actual making begins.
The portfolio tells you everything
The best signal I’ve found is to look at someone’s work — not what they were told to make, but what they chose to make when the brief was open. Side projects, personal newsletters, even the way they format a presentation deck. Taste reveals itself in the choices people make when nobody’s directing them.
Research from Harvard Business Review on hiring for potential supports this idea: past outputs are more predictive than credentials, especially for roles that require creative judgment. A well-curated portfolio from a self-taught marketer will often tell you more than an MBA from someone who’s never shipped anything they’re proud of.
Ask candidates to walk you through the tradeoffs they made — not just what they built, but what they chose not to include and why. The reasoning behind the editing reveals more about taste than the finished product alone.
Taste is a multiplier
The best marketing teams I’ve seen are small groups of people with strong taste and complementary skills. They produce more impactful work than teams three times their size, because taste is a multiplier. It makes everything better — the writing, the design, the strategy, the execution — without adding headcount or budget.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, marketing manager roles are projected to grow 8% through 2033 — faster than average. That means more hiring, more competition for talent, and more pressure to fill seats quickly. The temptation will be to hire for checkboxes: platform experience, years in role, industry background. Resist that temptation.
When you’re building a team, look for the people who care about the work at a level that’s almost unreasonable. The ones who reworked a subject line four times because the rhythm was off. The ones who pushed back on a campaign concept not because it was wrong, but because it wasn’t remarkable. That’s taste. And it’s the closest thing to an unfair advantage that exists in this business.
Skills can be taught. Tools can be learned. Taste is the rare thing — and it’s what separates teams that produce forgettable work from teams that produce the kind of work people actually remember.
