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With the tremendous number of marketing messages the average person encounters in a single day, it can be a challenge to make your brand stand out. The answer, asserts Bob Gilbreath, chief marketing strategist at Bridge Worldwide, is to create niche marketing that improves peoples lives. The more meaningful you make your marketing, he says, the more people are willing to pay for your products or services.

In his new book The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with Your Customer by Marketing With Meaning, Gilbreath says the new mandate for today’s niche marketer is to improve a customer’s life and solve basic human needs, not to “tell and sell.” Among his many examples, he points to Samsung’s charging stations for cell phones and laptops in airports across the country, and Home Depot’s home improvement classes. By creating these types of small services, Gilbreath notes, you will earn the trust and attention of today’s cynical customer. Here are the things meaningful marketers know:

1. It’s wrong to push. Smart marketers invite prospective customers in by creating messaging that appeals to the higher, unmet needs in their overall lives.

2. Most of our basic needs are satisfied by the products and services we already buy. But that’s not to say that the marketers of these basic products are exempt from creating marketing with meaning. Just the opposite: if you sell a commodity, the need for and opportunities to create marketing whose meaning transcends your products are limitless.

3. Marketing itself must improve consumers’ lives. It should accomplish something of intrinsic value, independent of the product or service it aims to sell, whether or not people actually ever purchase it.

4. More meaning equals more money. The longer equation is more like more meaning = more loyalty = higher prices = increased sales, but the end result is the same.