Utility creates relevance. Meaning creates loyalty
Products create utility. Brands connect utility to meaning. Utility wins the choice. Meaning is what keeps it.
Utility is the price of entry.
A product has to work. It has to be useful, available and fairly priced. But utility is the most copyable thing an organization owns. The moment a feature matters, competitors add it. Utility gets you considered. It rarely gets you kept.
Meaning is the part that does not commoditize.
Two products can do the same job and mean entirely different things. A can of water from Liquid Death performs like any other, and people pay more and wear the logo because of what it says, not what it pours. The function converged. The meaning did not, and the meaning is where the margin lives.
Relevance and loyalty are produced differently.
Relevance is earned by solving a problem better or cheaper. Loyalty is earned by tying that solution to who the customer is. Southwest is chosen for fares and kept for a personality that feels human in an industry that does not. Disney is chosen for the experience and kept for what the experience means to a family across a lifetime.
This is why pure efficiency loses over time.
A brand that competes only on utility is one feature or one discount away from replacement. A brand that has bound its utility to meaning has built a moat the spec sheet cannot cross, because the customer would have to give up part of themselves to switch.
Utility gets you considered. Meaning gets you kept.
The strategic implication.
Make the product genuinely useful, then decide what that usefulness means to the person using it, and connect the two until they are inseparable. The goal is for switching to feel like a loss of identity, not a change of vendor.
Seen in the work
Victory split the product in two. Victory Shield delivered the utility, the monitoring and protection. Victory delivered the meaning, the identity the customer was stepping into. The same software, kept for what it said about him, not only what it did.