Taste·mak·er (Noun) - /ˈtāstˌmākər/ - Someone or something that is leading in shaping and influencing appetites & desires across a culture. Tastemakers control the dominos that set the consumer market’s consciousness & reference points.

This edition is a guide for the people who really like to get in the deep depths of strategy. Buckle up. Future editions will not be this extensive unless requested!

I’ve consulted with countless CEO’s & Founders of multi-million dollar brands who are caught in the ways of traditional media.

Unwilling to do the things in their media strategy that would create an identity online people actually care about.

Boring. Dull. Dead. Unimaginative Brands.

If they had been running Crocs, it would have been bankrupt a decade ago.

We’ve been hating on Crocs for years. I don’t have to tell you this. Crocs are a unique case of how to become a tastemaker brand, because they defied the conventional brand-building wisdom of how a tastemaker is usually created in culture.

Consider the improbable nature of them outliving their hater era of 2000s American culture…

Emerged from their financial struggles and a fall from favor in the early 2010s… (It helped that they got millions in private equity dollars during this time.)

Then repopularized themselves into an entirely different generation than the era they started in.

How could Crocs have survived 2 decades worth of overwhelming negative perception & being called ugly and told they have no taste… and instead…

Build a brand that has generated $15.8 Billion in revenue and sold 720 million units since inception, while other fashion brands have completely flopped in that time span.

Stop me if you disagree: Considering the circumstances, Crocs should have easily been pushed out of public favor and become a long forgotten relic buried in the graveyard of 2000s culture, along with boy bands & Blockbusters.

But if they not only survived but ended up becoming a fashion mainstay, we missed something in the science of tastemaking.

Lifestyles & Lore Sells Shoes

Consider the carousel of shoe trends and how it filters through culture in seemingly unpredictable ways, and as a result, constantly changes consumer buying preferences.

Look at each of these examples and see if you can find the common denominator:

Heelys

• When I was growing up during the mid 2000s, teachers, principals and the hard working janitors who buffed the school floors were trying to figure out how to ban Heelys.

  I distinctly remember this aspect of my classmates elementary school age consumer thinking (Which I’m fairly certain was a shared nationwide thought process amongst millions of other kids, but this is just a theory):

  Adults desire to ban the shoes, made us want to buy them even more. That’s tastemaking.

Air Force Ones

• But even years before that, my sister and I were trying to figure out how to get at least 2 pair of Air Force Ones. (If you don’t understand this golden cultural reference, Nelly released a song in 2002 called “Air Force Ones”, and it was a catalyst for a whole new wave of popularity for Nike’s Air Force Ones.) That’s tastemaking.

Vans

• I also remember when Vans almost seemed like they were a mandatory part of owning a skateboard. They were deeply synonymous with skater culture. That’s tastemaking.

Toms

• Toms Shoes started to get really popular in youth church circles one year in the early 2010s. Their ‘buy one give one’ charity model activated a surge of popularity among charitable evangelical subculture. That’s tastemaking.

  Stacey Adams

  My dad, born in 1964, spoke highly of and absolutely loved Stacey Adams. Which was to him a high class professional dress shoe. This wasn’t a coincidence. This was a product feeling long ingrained in the minds of many dads with baby boomer parent. A perception that he passed down to me because of the way the shoes made him feel. That’s tastemaking.

Every example here is very specifically chosen because if you look close, they all have a connecting throughline in common for how that activated consumer demand.

All of them are deeply connected to a specific felt identity. All of these shoes existed in a space where their consumer could express, create, and participate in culture.

All of these shoes organically grew into culture by being adopted as expressions of a version of self. That is, they became a product that sold a version of felt identity, not just shoes.

2. Buying Is a Social Act & vibes are a driving force.

Making purchases like clothing, cars, electronics, skincare products, and the like isn’t purely an act of logic/rationale/practicality, it is a social act based on vibes.

We often believe ourselves to be independent people, making purely rational decisions based exclusively in personal thought only. But that is not how people interact with products.

What drives the market for many consumer products is one’s own conception of self and how the brand aligns with helping people feel the identity they want. And this isn’t a conscious thing on a consumer’s part.

It’s why dozens of European luxury goods brands are constantly able to control the global luxury goods market & become staples of America’s high class purchasing decisions. They are better than other brands at intentionally and meticulously creating luxury a

They understand the elements that make consumers feel toward a brand. Namely:

1. The influence of social buying. Social Buying is the phenomenon of growing in taste for a brand or product as you see others own a brand.

2. A relentless renewal of brand vibes (The aura we feel about a brand subconsciously).

That’s why vibes can take a brand further than big marketing budgets with no vibes can.

If someone does not feel implied meaning in the vibe of a brand they will not regularly purchase it as a long term behavior. Once they feel vibes that connect to their sense of identity, the purchasing behavior can become almost automatic.

3. The Role of Brand Vibes

Vibes are the non-verbal stimuli & associations that make you feel about a brand. It goes beyond just perception. You can’t fake a vibe, you either have it or you don’t. Vibes are felt across the entire brand & product experience.

People are always communicating vibes to the world around them when they choose a brand/product.

A brand’s vibe experience must align with the vibe someone wants to express in the world.

Again, these are subconscious buying motivators that are felt. A person would not necessarily be able to verbally articulate what it feels like when a product is desirable to them, or always clearly identify what the core of the motivating factor behind their brand loyalty is.

But the vibe of a brand activates subconscious desirability.

Powerful brand vibes translates to people living with a brand in their day to day life. Which then unlocks the power of a brand to set consumer taste in the future.

Tastemaking happens when a brands creative universe consistently provides a vibe that people look to for reference. Whether to create their personal sense of style, or to express self to the world around them. This applies to personal brands as well. But if you are building a brand in the modern internet world, vibe is the unlock.

Let’s do an experiment, Can you feel the vibe in these brands creative direction?:

Vibes in Art Direction

Leveraging Personalities to Create Vibe Alignment

Vibes In Ad Design

4. Crocs Vibes Reset: The Ugly Brand Became a Uniform

In order to scale, Crocs had to reshape how an entire generation of consumers felt about their brands vibe.

For one generation of consumers, Crocs are practical & comfortable no frills shoes for health care workers, boaters, and people like me who want to go on walks around the neighborhood. That only scales so much.

For gen alpha & parts of gen Z, they are customizable & personal shoes they can collect & be creative with.

There is a difference between how consumers interact with brands that they see as utilities vs. uniforms.

A brand becomes a uniform when it is a subconscious identifying piece of how someone lives or wants to live. And lazy is the uniform Crocs serves.

“Uniform” brands are not just clothing brands.

Crocs are for the lazy in us. The parts of our lifestyle where we’re not dressing up. The parts that are just chill & relaxed. And the value in Crocs ability to give that vibe a place for expression, overcomes any perceived ugliness. Felt vibes that connect with an identity drive revenue, full stop.

This is why teenagers are so powerful to product distribution.

Because they have the most influence in shaping how their peers desire to dress and what they desire to buy the most. That’s because of teenagers being in a stage of actualization where they are seeking things to create individuality with. That process never actually stops as we get older, it just becomes more defined and fixed from person to person.

Crocs is a brand that fills that space, even if you, dear reader, think they’re ugly!

And the deeper you interact with a buyer’s individuality, the more likely you are to get organic content online that just comes from people living with the product naturally in day to day culture.

And as a result, content does the real work of influencing others to buy without it feeling like sales or influencer marketing.

The type of internet content that you can’t calculate for. It just works because enjoy the vibes. Obviously this type of influence on other people’s purchasing habits proceeded the digital era, but now buying habits can shift overnight.

This is how Crocs, and Vans, and Air force ones, and Chuck taylors, and Nike socks, and Lululemon leggings, get ingrained in buying habits during ages 11-18 & carry on into later stages of life when you gain more buying power.

Creating a brand’s vibe is not simply creating new brand guidelines & logos. If you think that you are missing the point of what consumers need to feel for it to influence their taste. So everything you put out on social media needs to be in the interest of communicating vibes.

Influencer marketing tries to leverage the vibes of a personality’s social influence & connection with their audience as a brand’s own personality.

But that often fails badly & produces no real returns.

In the earlier, infant days of influencer marketing on social platforms, product & brand endorsements integrated more naturally and less disruptively into a consumer’s online browsing.

Social networks democratized celebrity so much that the amount of parasocial relationships consumers had went through the roof.

Internet media was being consumed in never before seen formats, so ‘influencing’ was new and wasn’t decaying the authenticity of being apart of an audience as rapidly.

As the volume of influencer ‘campaigns’ increased, the effectiveness decreased as consumers learned to detect inauthenticity & salesmanship, which is not what they are seeking when they are apart of any audience.

Disingenuousness, salesmanship, fakeness, and corniness is a vibe that can be felt in a brands identity.

You’ve seen them, the thrown together product endorsement by some Instagram user or celeb. Where you can practically see the check they got to mumble about something they’ve never tried or truly care about.

Companies end up wasting money and influencing no one.

We now reached the era of influencer where the culture of influencing itself is being critiqued. And rightfully so.

So if you are going to do any “influencing” now, you better get really good at creating vibes.

Because we feel the vibes.

Beginning in 2017, Crocs was able to change how its vibe was perceived among a new generation of teenage consumers.

Between 2017-2021 Crocs reshaped their vibe exclusively around high fashion, music artists, and streetwear brands.

The partnerships included collaborations with Nicki Minaj, Post Malone, Christopher Kane, Drew Berrymore, Bad Bunny, Justin Bieber, Balenciaga and others.

This was not about celebrity endorsements as much as it was creating a feeling focused on a specific type of consumer. Brands try celebrity endorsements all the time and are hilariously bad at it.

Because we know just getting a celebrity to hold up a product doesn’t mean impact on a consumers decision making & sense of desire. Brands often worsen the vibe consumers feel about them by doing bad celeb partnerships. By and large, people don’t mindlessly purchase because they see a celebrity wearing it. But they will buy if there is vibe alignment with the celebrity though.

In the internet world where vibes move fast, many brands have a marketing problem because they have a vibe problem.

In other words, they don’t creatively inspire anyone to make them a part of their sense of expression.

They’re creatively uninspiring (whether by virtue of a bad product experience, lack of aesthetics, lack of entertaining content, no personality/story, or just being boring.) So they contribute nothing to the cultural conversations among consumers that would drive revenue.

Tastemaking brands are distinct from others because they choose to intentionally pursue driving cultural conversation.

The impact of Tik-Tok aesthetics, Snapchat, Instagram reels, Youtube Shorts on consumption habits has also made discovering new niche expressions and participating in cultural conversation more fast pace than ever.

Which means most things are short term trends rather than long-term tastemakers.

Your relevance and stickiness as a brand is only as large as your narrative is interesting to the cultural consciousness in any given era.

A brands relevance increases by regularly making high impact bets through its product experiences, content, media, and how it participates in culture. If they do not consistently participate in culture by communicating its vibe powerfully, it won’t be passed on to new consumers aging into more buying power, or kept as a regularly recurring buying habit as people age and explore other identities & expressions of their lifestyle.

5. The Culture Pipeline Framework

There are 8 steps brands must travel through in order to achieve tastemaker level influence & status. These brands achieve the highest levels of growth. But the journey to get there requires that the driving forces of the brand be culture creation & cultural impact.

A goal of any consumer brand should be to push themselves through the cultural pipeline.

The culture pipeline is the mechanism through which a brand filters into the lifestyle, desires and customs of any group of people. As the brand travels along the 8 steps of the pipeline, the brand is becoming a cultural artifact. Each step necessitates the brand activating the previous step. You can’t skip any steps.

This isn’t a formula however. There really is no set formula.

The cultural pipeline is is why some brands emerge as the flavor or the moment on social media and others never get discovered broadly.

Vibes is about a sense of taste and the ability to express creativity in a way that connects with people, no matter what the product is. This is where Crocs succeeded regardless of how many were anti-Croc. Crocs was so polarizing that it helped in allowing them to succeed at accessing culture. Once they made it through the first 6 steps, they were able to refresh themselves enough to prevent themselves from falling into cultural irrelevancy.

This is the key to content creation & brand growth in 2025 forward.

There’s a big difference between a brand that buys a ton of ad inventory and a brand that gets embedded in culture and buying habits.

That’s when people start to do distribution for you. That’s when you start to get desirability for your brand that ad dollars alone cannot activate. This is what happened for Crocs when they reinvented their vibe.

Tastemaking Happens When Consumers Do Distribution For You.

Even further, Tastemaker status is the final boss level a stage at which communities form around your brand in the most powerful way possible.

Step 3 is Culture creation. That being when people are naturally and organically incorporating a brand into customs, entertainment, content, creative arts, memes, styles, events, and day to day social life.

When your brand starts to represent the right vibe, you will create a brand that births a community that automatically does culture creation for you.

We saw an entire subculture form around Stanley Cups in 2023-2024 that turned it into a $750 million business.

And it wasn’t because everybody saw an ad on social media.

It was because products with vibes cause people to buy and share socially as extensions of their interests and desires.

Even more so now in the digital era than in the past, Consumers have the tendency to acquire a taste for a product as you see others around you acquiring taste for a product.

Timberland boots are also a great example of this to me. Because they became a deeply entrenched staple of east coast fashion without that being the stated goal in the beginning of Timberland’s marketing strategy. They were built as a utilitarian boot for blue collar workers. Only then to achieve exponential growth through existing in hip hop culture.

You’re not paying for that type of culture creation. It doesn’t matter how many ads you run. You have to know how to curate a vibe.

And curating vibes is about knowing how to present and where to present a brand to maximize culture pipeline movement.

This is when the vibes distribution multiplier effect starts for a brand. The place where you see celebrities wearing a product without having to pay them for it. That then filters down the culture funnel into Tiktoks, snapchat and instagram posts, shares in the group chat, earned media and the brand appearing in the wild what seemed to be suddenly. This phenomenon made Stanley Cups unstoppable in 2023/2024. Its how you end up with a cultural pipeline moment you could never think to pay for. Storytelling you don’t have to manufacture.

Like this viral Tiktok posted about a fire in a car that showed how the cups kept ice untouched.

@danimarielettering

Thirsty after you catch on fire? @Stanley 1913 is like no problem i gotchu #fyp #carfire #accident #stanleycup

This is how Crocs, despite the dominant narrative that they are ugly, was able to underneath the surface create its own consumer with a taste for Crocs.

The internet is a vibes economy, where one piece of shareable content that has vibes can capture more desire than millions of dollars in ads spent on a super bowl ad.

Some brands, frankly most brands, will not be able to reach this status.

Mostly because their leadership will not embrace allowing creativity & cultural participation to be at the center of their business strategy.

Creating desire and shifting habits is a long game. A long game most brand leaders with instant expectations for financial returns created by the speed of modern performance marketing just won’t play.

A brands marketing mix is in part a creative exercise where it is building an environment of vibes.

You cannot copy competitors ads, self reference, reprise and reissue your way into tastemaker level desire. You’ll die from irrelevance first.

6. Strategy To Increase Vibe Immediately (Personal or Otherwise)

The questions to ask:

✅ What emotions does my brand trigger? (Nostalgia, rebellion, exclusivity, playfulness?)

✅ Do the visuals on my social accounts communicate a feeling?

✅ Am I Telling Good Enough Stories & Compelling Narratives, or am I safe?

✅ How does my brand score right now in terms of vibes?

Introducing The Brand-Vibe-O-Meter

So you as a marketer or creative want to turn into a curator of vibes and ultimately be a tastemaker? You need to understand that vibes is a shifting spectrum at any given time.

Introducing a system that helps brands develop strategic activities that increase vibes.

A 0-100 scoring method that will show where a brands vibe lives at a given time based on core impact criteria that determines score. If you can start properly applying this method for scoring brands, you can identify how to actually improve their vibes.

More on this soon.

Keep Dreaming. - Kevin Oohhh