Let $\mathscr{C}_n=\{-1,1\}^n$ be the discrete hypercube equipped with the uniform probability measure $σ_n$. Talagrand's influence inequality (1994) asserts that there exists $C\in(0,\infty)$ such that for every $n\in\mathbb{N}$, every function $f:\mathscr{C}_n\to\mathbb{C}$ satisfies $$\mathrm{Var}_{σ_n}(f) \leq C \sum_{i=1}^n \frac{\|\partial_if\|_{L_2(σ_n)}^2}{1+\log\big(\|\partial_if\|_{L_2(σ_n)}/\|\partial_i f\|_{L_1(σ_n)}\big)}.$$ In this work, we undertake a systematic investigation of this and related inequalities via harmonic analytic and stochastic techniques and derive applications to metric embeddings. We prove that Talagrand's inequality extends, up to an additional doubly logarithmic factor, to Banach space-valued functions under the necessary assumption that the target space has Rademacher type 2 and that this doubly logarithmic term can be omitted if the target space admits an equivalent 2-uniformly smooth norm. These are the first vector-valued extensions of Talagrand's influence inequality. We also obtain a joint strengthening of results of Bakry-Meyer (1982) and Naor-Schechtman (2002) on the action of negative powers of the hypercube Laplacian on functions $f:\mathscr{C}_n\to E$, whose target space $E$ has nontrivial Rademacher type via a new vector-valued version of Meyer's multiplier theorem (1984). Inspired by Talagrand's influence inequality, we introduce a new metric invariant called Talagrand type and estimate it for Banach spaces with prescribed Rademacher or martingale type, Gromov hyperbolic groups and simply connected Riemannian manifolds of pinched negative curvature. Finally, we prove that Talagrand type is an obstruction to the bi-Lipschitz embeddability of nonlinear quotients of the hypercube $\mathscr{C}_n$, thus deriving new nonembeddability results for these finite metrics.