The System
Three perspectives. One fundamental question: What makes something valuable?
We live in a world where extraordinary things are created, yet remarkably few achieve the relevance they were designed for. Brands invest in identity, aesthetics, innovation and communication, often without fully understanding why some ideas resonate while others, despite their brilliance, fail to connect.
I use three interconnected frameworks to examine this disconnect:
The Taste Economy explores the cultural and commercial forces that shape our perception of value.
The Five Layers provide a structured way to examine how value is created, expressed and experienced.
The Value Gap identifies the distance between what something offers, what it intends to communicate and what people actually perceive.
Together, they form a system for understanding why certain ideas matter, why others lose their relevance, and how to close the distance between ambition and impact.
Value is an interpretation.
Before anyone compares prices, they have already read a set of signals: material, space, language, people, story, a logo — or the deliberate absence of one. Those signals tell them whether something feels ordinary, credible, rare, safe, fashionable, excessive or worth the trouble. That interpretation is not decoration around the product. It is part of the product people are buying.
The Taste Economy
The Taste Economy is the economic value created by perception: how aesthetics, cultural codes, status, context and emotion shape what people notice, choose, remember and pay for. Its practical question is simple: why can two things with similar utility produce radically different levels of desire — and where does that difference in value come from?
The five layers
Branding can make you recognisable. It cannot make you relevant. I use these five layers to find where a premium actually comes from — and where it is being lost.
01
FUNCTION
What does it actually do?
02
SIGNALS
What does it communicate?
03
CODES
What meaning does the audience assign?
04
PERCEIVED VALUE
What does it feel worth paying for?
05
COMMERCIAL CONSEQUENCE
Price, preference, loyalty, attention, status.
The Value Gap
Where value is lost, misread or left unpriced.
The Value Gap is the distance between what something objectively offers, what it intends to signal and what people actually perceive. The Value Gap Diagnostic locates that distance — and turns it into decisions.
"Visibility is not relevance."
TASH
Luxury makes the mechanism easy to see because functional explanations run out quickly.
A watch does more than tell time. A hotel does more than provide a bed. A restaurant does more than transfer calories.
But the mechanism is not limited to luxury. It shows up in retail, hospitality, media, real estate, fashion, food, cities, institutions and cultural projects — anywhere perceived value affects choice.
A brand can be visible and still be culturally irrelevant. A place can be beautiful and still feel generic. A product can be technically excellent and still fail to become desirable.
The useful question is not “how do we look more premium?” It is: what exactly are people being asked to value here, and why should they? That question changes strategy. It forces decisions about what to emphasise, what to remove, which codes to use, which audiences matter, what not to imitate, and where the premium is actually coming from.
Origins of The System
None of the underlying mechanics are new. Thorstein Veblen described status consumption in 1899. Pierre Bourdieu showed in 1979 how taste is socially structured, learned, and functions as a form of capital. Research since has looked at how aesthetics, context and perceived value affect preference and willingness to pay.
What I do is not academic work. I use those mechanics as a method for commercial decisions: where is value being created in perception, and what can we do with it?
a note on the term
“Taste Economy” is not a phrase I coined. It has appeared elsewhere in digital-culture and creative-business writing. What is mine is a specific reading of it — the economics of perceived value across brands, places and ideas — and the five-layer model and the Value Gap Diagnostic.