Taste Economics

Why are we paying for things?

Welcome to the Sociology of Business. If you are not subscribed, join the community by subscribing below and share it with everyone you think may find it useful. You can find my book, The Business of Aspiration on Amazon and you can find me on Instagram and Twitter. For those new here, in my last analysis, titled The Web3 Playbook for Brands, I explored strategic brand and business growth scenarios that go beyond minting NFTs.

There’s a number of ways to assign value to something. On the most basic, economic, level, products perform and are priced based on their properties (materials, labor). Their value is a combination of this performance and price.

There’s also a number of ways to evaluate something, from looking only at an item’s price to knowing about its unique history and heritage. Some forms of evaluation are obvious, others are predicated on taste, knowledge, cultural savvy, or time and money investment, or belonging to a community.

In the framework that goes from products to services that accompany products to brand experiences and stories, I call out four different ways of creating, distributing and capturing value. The criteria range from purely economic to entirely intangible and symbolic, where the narrative that surrounds products is deemed more valuable than products themselves.