Competence Gets You Considered. Meaning Gets You Chosen.
On the coming shift from capability to values—and why the brands that win the next decade will lead with what they believe.
Something is shifting, and most businesses haven't priced it in yet.
Look around. Politics, climate, the economy—the ground is moving. And even in the steadier corners of the world, people are tired. Tired of greed dressed up as ambition. Tired of corporate language that says everything and means nothing. Tired of power structures that ask for loyalty and give nothing back.
That fatigue is hardening into a quiet new standard. When people are choosing between options that are all, more or less, equally capable, they reach for the one that feels good for the world—and good to be associated with. The old rules of business aren't gone, but they're dying. What's replacing them is a demand for transparency, honesty, and conscience. A pull back toward fairness, equity, and stability. A return to our nature as part of nature.
You can see it most clearly in who's entering the workforce. Gen Z treats transparency as a baseline, not a perk—one Adobe study found 85% were less likely to even apply for a job that didn't list a salary range. And they're not just chasing the paycheck: in Deloitte's 2025 survey of more than 23,000 young workers, 89% said a sense of purpose matters to their job satisfaction, and 44% had already walked away from a job that lacked one. This isn't entitlement. It's a preview—of a workforce, and a customer base, that expects the businesses it gives its time and money to be doing some good in the world, not just turning a profit.
That expectation follows them to the checkout. In the same Deloitte research, 65% of Gen Z said they'd pay more for sustainable products—a direct rejection of the idea that price and features decide everything. And it's reshaping how companies signal what they stand for.
There are now roughly 10,000 Certified B Corporations worldwide—businesses that meet verified standards for social and environmental performance—across more than 100 countries, and the movement's workforce has doubled in just a few years. The tell is on the demand side: among consumers who recognize the B Corp label, B Lab reports that about 85% say it influences what they buy.
Profit as the only motive is on its way out, replaced by something more holistic: doing business with a conscience, in plain view.
Here's what that means for anyone building a brand: from here forward, the businesses that earn real attention, real followers, and real loyalty will be the ones that share their values—and actually live them. Not perfectly. Humanly. But visibly enough that people can tell what you stand for before they ever buy.
The problem isn't whether you're good
Most of us work in markets where plenty of people can do the job.
Multiple photographers. Multiple designers. Multiple attorneys. Multiple coaches. Multiple coffee shops on the same block.
When everyone clears the competence bar, competence stops being the deciding factor. The question in your customer's mind is no longer "Are you capable?" It's "Why this one?"
And the answer usually has very little to do with features. It has to do with identity, values, trust, and belonging.
Think back to early 2017. Uber and Lyft did the same thing—get you from here to there—and to most riders the two apps were interchangeable. Then, during the airport protests over the new travel ban, Uber was widely seen as profiting from the moment while Lyft publicly opposed the policy and pledged $1 million to the ACLU. #DeleteUber trended, and Lyft surged into the ten most-downloaded apps in the country. Lyft hadn't become a better ride-hailing service overnight. It had become the option that let people feel aligned with their own values—and an ordinary transportation choice quietly turned into a statement about who you are.
Competence gets you considered. Meaning gets you chosen.
People don't buy what you think they buy
There's a ladder underneath every purchase.
People don't buy products. They buy outcomes. They don't really buy outcomes either. They buy feelings. And they don't ultimately buy feelings. They buy identities.
Nobody buys a Patagonia jacket because they need a jacket. They're buying environmental stewardship, a sense of adventure, self-reliance, and membership in a tribe of people who care about the same things. The jacket is just the artifact—the physical thing that lets them carry the meaning around.
Closer to home, plenty of Floridians choose Publix over a cheaper or closer option not because the groceries are unmatched, but because the brand signals a certain order, friendliness, and regional belonging—a quiet sense that this is how things are supposed to feel here. The groceries are the artifact. The belonging is the actual purchase.
So the real question for your business isn't what do you make? It's what is the artifact of your work—and what is the deeper thing people are actually buying when they choose you?
Values are the new signal
This is where most brands get it backwards. They treat values as a marketing layer—a page on the website, a campaign in June. But values aren't a message. They're a signal, and signals only work when they're backed by behavior.
A value becomes real the moment it changes a decision. In 2014, CVS walked away from an estimated $2 billion a year in tobacco sales—roughly 3% of its revenue—because it could not credibly call itself a health company while ringing up cigarettes. It even renamed itself CVS Health. That wasn't a slogan. It was a costly, visible act that made the stated value believable.
The reverse holds too, and the receipts are more recent. When Target scaled back its diversity commitments in early 2025, it triggered a sustained boycott; foot traffic fell for weeks, and Target's own CEO conceded the backlash was one of the forces dragging on a weak quarter. Costco, which held its ground, kept growing. It isn't a mechanical law—Walmart pulled back similar programs and largely escaped the fallout—but the pattern is hard to miss: when a brand abandons a value it once claimed, the people who chose it for that value notice, and some of them walk.
How values become signals. How identity becomes community. How meaning becomes preference.
That's the sequence. When your values are real and visible, they act as a filter: the right people recognize themselves in you and move closer, while the wrong ones move on. That self-selection is what turns an audience into a community, and a community into the kind of loyalty no feature list can buy.
A useful gut check: most brands could pass a "stranger test" on what they do. A stranger watching from the outside could probably describe your service. But could that same stranger tell you what you believe? That second question is far more revealing—and for most businesses, far harder to answer.
The gap between the two is the work.
The takeaway
Capability is flattening. Tools, talent, and tactics are becoming widely available and increasingly similar across competitors. As that gap closes, the deciding factor moves to something tools can't replicate: what you stand for, and whether people believe you mean it.
The brands of the future will lead with their values and their cultural point of view. The product or service won't disappear—but it will share the stage with, and sometimes stand behind, the meaning the business represents.
And this isn't only about products. When someone weighs Tampa against Austin, Charlotte, or Miami, they're rarely just comparing tax rates and square footage—they're choosing the life they imagine living and the community they want to belong to. A city is a brand like any other: chosen on identity as much as economics. The same is true of an institution, a nonprofit, a movement, or a single person's reputation.
So it's worth sitting with the questions underneath all of this:
What is your work really about? What do you want people to feel—not think—after they encounter you? And what's the value you believe in but rarely say out loud?
Answer those honestly, and you stop competing on whether you're capable. You start being chosen.
These are the questions we'll be working through together at the next Narrative Salon on June 23 at Ybor Hive—a casual, no-slides, no-pitch conversation for founders, creators, and operators thinking about the same things. If this resonated, come think out loud with us. Link to RSVP.
