For a decade, values have been marketing’s cheapest asset. A purpose statement cost nothing to write, a pledge cost little to sign, and the market rewarded the words without auditing the practice. That trade is closing, and I think it closes faster than most businesses expect. Call it the values-washing correction: the point at which claimed values stop being a free upside and start being a checked liability.
The scrutiny is already institutional
This isn’t a mood; it’s machinery. Greenwashing has moved from reputational risk to regulatory exposure, with UK and EU regulators actively pursuing misleading environmental claims and sustainability requirements rippling down supply chains to businesses far smaller than the rules formally capture. EU rules on misleading environmental claims Procurement teams increasingly ask for evidence, not statements. And a decade of exposure has trained buyers, employees and journalists to treat values claims as testable assertions rather than decoration. The infrastructure for checking now exists. It only gets used more from here.
Why the correction punishes the middle
The businesses with nothing to say about values will be fine; nobody audits a claim that was never made. The businesses whose values are genuinely operational will be more than fine; scrutiny is their friend, because they pass it. The exposure sits in the middle: businesses that adopted the language because the language was working, whose values live on the website but not in the decisions. For them, every increment of scrutiny converts a marketing asset into a liability, because the gap between claim and practice is now the story. And the middle, honestly, is most of the market.
The tell is always the same
You can predict who fails the correction with one test I’ve used for years, in marketing and in governance: could this business’s values statement be copied word for word onto a competitor’s website and be equally true? If yes, the values aren’t operational; they’re wallpaper. Operational values show up as costs willingly paid, work declined, suppliers chosen on more than price, decisions that went the harder way because of what the business claims to believe. Wallpaper values show up as adjectives. Scrutiny can tell the difference in an afternoon.
What the survivors will have done
The businesses that come through the correction stronger will have done three unglamorous things. They’ll have narrowed their claims to what they actually do, because a modest true claim now beats an impressive vague one. They’ll have built evidence as they went, not retrofitted it under pressure. And they’ll have let their values cost them something visible, because paid costs are the only proof buyers now believe. None of this is a communications exercise. The communication is the last step, and the easiest, once the practice is real.
The opportunity hiding in it
Corrections reprice assets, and this one reprices authenticity upwards. As performative positioning becomes risky, genuinely values-driven businesses stop competing with everyone who merely sounds like them. The imitators exit the category; the field clears. If your values are real, the correction is the best marketing environment you’ll ever operate in, provided you can evidence what you claim. If they’re not, the kindest advice I can offer is to say less, mean more, and start closing the gap before someone else measures it for you.
