You’ve Got to be Kitten Me
How NOT to ignore situational context
One day when I was five, a kitten came wandering in through our classroom door. The teacher let her stay, but warned us that if we couldn’t ignore the cat and get our work done, we would miss recess.
Guess who missed recess?
I can’t ignore a kitten! To me that tiny cat may as well have been an elephant in the room. To ignore it and focus on the boring rows of math problems wasn’t just difficult—it was impossible.
Ignoring context isn’t just silly—it’s alienating
If you come at someone with your messaging, unaware of or uncurious about what they’re already thinking and doing, then at best they’re going to ignore you. At worst, your lack of awareness will be felt as an interruption or annoyance. Think of the last time you tried to read something and were harassed by pop-up ads for things you don’t care about. Annoying. Now consider the last link you followed from an online source, to buy something. Those ads have considered your interest, and linked it to what they want you to care about. And they work.
Enormous brands don’t need to worry about this as much, at least not when it comes to digital content, because they’re pumping out wide swaths of it and letting the algorithm do the work for them, winnowing out what gets clicks and what doesn’t. Like buckshot, they are likely to hit their targets by sheer volume (and automated targeting).
For the rest of us, well, we need to be a bit more thoughtful. It’s not hard, but it does require expanding your thinking/creative process beyond what you want, and allowing in more of what already is.
Letting the Elephant Lead
Imagine if, instead of instructing us to ignore it, our teacher had embraced that kitten. What if we’d had a discussion about where it came from. We could have estimated how far the nearest house was, and how long a kitten might take to walk from house to school. There was an opportunity for incorporating the fun and immediacy of the kitten and connecting it to our math lesson that could have made learning come alive for us that day, that would have humanized our teacher and made us more receptive to her in general.
This is why situationally aware content is so important. When we want to grab someone’s attention, whether it’s for a math lesson or a new product or program, we can’t approach them as though we live in a vacuum; instead we need to read the room, figure out where people’s hearts and minds already are, and meet them there, first.
The good news is: once you begin approaching content this way, your brand begins to come alive. Situational responsiveness is more authentic, more meaningful. It reminds people that we are all humans existing in a shared cultural moment together, and that’s when you begin to build community, mutual trust, and brand affinity, and that’s exactly the point.