The director of marketing was a guy named Roger. I don’t remember his last name because everyone called him "Roger Baby.” I was assigned to the marketing group and Roger Baby was told to find something for me to do. He found out that I was a graphic design student and he decided to try something. He had me create in-store flyers for the retail stores that advertised specials we would run. The stores liked this. It was not long before they started to request we add other sale items to the flyers. Next they asked for posters advertising holiday film deals (people take a lot more photos on holidays.) I quickly found that I had so many requests for ads and posters that I could hardly get my work done. I remember the day that I left that job. Roger Baby came up to me and said, "When you first came here, I did not know what to do with you. But you have made yourself indispensable around here.”

The golden moment in marketing is when you realize that the product or service you are promoting has become so much a part of people’s lives that they consider it indispensable. They cannot live without it. There are a lot of examples of this. Think about cell phones. A wireless phone used to be something that you would only see in a spy movie. They were futuristic, they were only for the rich and the famous. Now they are as common in stores all around the world. I remember the times before cell phones and the world seem to function quite well without them. But they have been marketed very well and they have become indispensable.

How do you market your products and services to become an indispensable part of your target market’s life? Take a page out of the marketing of the cell. They became staples of life in the 21^st century by an age old marketing tactic: they played on people’s emotions, particularly their fears. The cell phone came about as protection against being stranded on a roadside in the middle of the night with no way to call for help. Every driver needed a cell phone to make sure they were safe. If you were caught without a cell phone and had a flat tire, you were toast. Now this is a very good reason to have a cell phone; ask anyone who has been in the broken down car scenario I just described. However, it was just the justification that most people needed to own something they had viewed as opulent just a few years earlier.

In order for your product or service to take a step as an indispensable item in the lives of your customers, you have to have an emotional connection with your target audience. In all reality, there are other items in life that are truly indispensable, but have not been marketed that way. An example of this would be the essentials of life, like a roof over your head or a bed to sleep in. However, it is estimated that as many as 40% of homeless people in Washington DC have no place to lay their heads at night, but have a cell phone. The phone is considered by many homeless to be an essential of life, according to an interview done by the Washington Post in 2009. "A cellphone is the only way you can call to keep up with your food stamps, your housing application, your job," the Post quoted Rommel McBride, who had been homeless for six years. All of this captured national attention when First Lady Michelle Obama made an appearance at a soup kitchen and was met with dozens of street people taking photos of her with their cell phones’ camera feature.* Don’t think that the cell phone’s indispensable marketing was lost on Americans. I had a friend who did a short term missions project to the impoverished people of Ghana in West Africa. He was shocked that even though they were living in squalor, the vast majority of people had cell phones.

The other thing you need to realize about marketing is playing on emotions is only the first step. The marketing of the cell phone did not stop with the fear factor. The next step in the evolution of cell phone marketing was to show how practical they were. Remember when you had to find a pay phone and a dime to make a call home? With a cell phone, you could call immediately. It was convenient. And all of the sudden, an expectation was set. No one should have to wait to make a phone call, not even to talk about nothing.

The next marketing step was to challenge the status quo. It started with the way people were billed for phone usage. A million minutes and unlimited texting for one monthly service charge replaced the way the traditional phone companies charged their customers for land lines. All of the sudden, there were no long distance charges and no wires. After this, cell phone companies took a step that the land lines could not. They introduced texting, cameras on phones, connections to the internet. They turned a phone into a small computer. It became the connection to the world around you.

Are you marketing the many ways your products or services are making life easier for your customers? Are you expanding their dependence upon your product or service by challenging the status quo? If you are marketing to become indispensable, you have to push beyond the traditional limits.