Not good about you. Smart about themselves. That's the shift, and it's a bigger one than it sounds.
The brands people are most loyal to, most vocal about, most likely to recommend without anyone asking them to, they all do some version of this. They make the customer the main character. Choosing this product, following this person, being part of this community says something about who you are. It reflects well on your taste, your judgment, your eye for quality or timing or authenticity. The brand almost becomes secondary to the feeling of being the kind of person who found it.
Why It Works
Apple has done this for decades and it's almost a cliché to mention at this point, but it's worth understanding why it works rather than just acknowledging that it does. You're not buying a laptop. You're being the kind of person who buys that laptop, and there's a whole identity architecture built around what that means. Streetwear brands do the same thing through scarcity and cultural alignment. Certain newsletters do it by making readers feel like they're getting information that other people don't have access to. Indie products with cult followings do it by making discovery feel like a personality trait.
In all of these cases the product is almost a prop. What people are actually buying is the feeling of being someone who chose well, someone who was early, who has taste, who gets it. That feeling is what drives the organic advocacy that no ad budget can replicate.
This Isn't Manipulation
This isn't manipulation. It's understanding that people are not making purchase decisions in a rational vacuum of feature comparisons and price calculations. They're making them in the context of identity: who they are, who they want to be, what they want a particular choice to say about them. Marketing that ignores that context and just leads with product attributes is fighting with one hand tied behind its back.
The creative implication is that the most important question in any brief isn't what do we want to say about ourselves. It's what do we want someone to feel about themselves after encountering this. When the answer to that question is clear, everything else, the tone, the format, the message, the positioning, tends to fall into place around it.