I’m trying really, really hard to get through Seth Godin‘s book Tribes. But the man’s so damned thought-provoking I have to stop every ten pages and reflect for a couple of hours. Then I have to back and reread those 10 pages because they were so damned thought-provoking. At this rate, I figure I’ll owe my local library $2,421 by the time I return the book.

Here’s one of the big points that I keep coming back to: people have decided to spend more time on what really matters, and less time on ancillary baubles. That means that in order to make an impression, you have to matter.

No easy task, to be sure. You can’t just walk up to someone and say, “Hey, my product matters. You should buy it.” You can replace the word “matters” with any combination of verbs, adjectives and adverbs — my product whistles, my product is green, my product moves quickly, and so on — but none of those things works if the product doesn’t matter to people.

Let’s look at the things that people are buying. Smartphones are on the rise. Why? Because being connected matters to a large number of people. That doesn’t simply mean connecting to the Web; it means connecting with other people, businesses and resources that make our day-to-day lives more meaningful. It means being able to put our daily activities in the context of what is going on around the world. That matters, and it matters a whole lot more than the granular aspect of who-has-what-app.

People are buying more eBooks, it seems. This is good (disclaimer: I am a writer), considering people were buying fewer actual books prior to the release of readers like the Kindle. And prior to the Kindle, it almost seemed as though literature didn’t matter as much to the average consumer. As it turns out, however, it just matters less than the convenience of consuming that literature. In other words, people seem to think reading is important, but not at the expense of handling (and paying for) cumbersome media.

The problem is conveying this idea that your product or service matters. How are you doing this? And how are you figuring out what matters to people?