Context Is King, and Its Associations the Kingmakers!
Humans are always trying to create a story with whatever is happening around them, and the right associations for what we sell are important.
Are you happy?
Your answer might vary, and the question is specific but open-ended on purpose, to understand the lens through which you view the question. Are you thinking of this while you are getting in bed on a Sunday night dreading the commute the next day? Or are you doing it while you are on vacation experiencing wonderful sensory overloads? That is exactly the point I am trying to make.
Context matters. Context really matters.
Yet, we do not seem to grasp this so well. We think, for example, of what we are selling, how to make them look more appealing, differentiated, useful and so on. While all that is fine and needed, getting them right without factoring in the preceding aspect of context massively reduces the rate of success. Context is the first lens through which we ought to be looking at things, and this has to be the context seen through the lens of the customer whom we want to engage with us.
Context tells us of the possible emotions at play and they in turn tell us how to click with our potential customers. If we take the example of one of our potential customers who is dreading the Monday morning commute at 10 PM on Sunday night, and we pop up on their Instagram feed, how do you think they will think of our brand? We know the customer is in a negative state of mind, but the answer is not straightforward. The customers will make an association with our brand, and it is upon us to see how to make it into a positive or a negative one. A post talking about our product features, a product not related to making the commute any better, or making the customer feel any better, will have a negative association in the mind of the customer. If the post, somehow makes the customer feel better about her situation, we can create a positive association. In this manner, we have to figure out the associations that are at play with the customers we reach out to, and the right association can create fans, not just customers.
I will give two more contrasting examples of positive and negative associations.
The Leela Palace goes to great lengths to remember what I ordered in my room during my past trips in order to recreate the experience for me. Great positive association. They understand my context, a business traveler, away from home, who feels good about familiarity. Also, who doesn’t like to feel special? And they do what it takes to create a very positive and strong association for me with their brand, using services as instruments to create positive associations in my mind.
On the other hand, it amazes me how some ads, unrelated that too, pop up on X in the middle of a very morose trending topic. Not good for the advertiser!
To give a different example, think of how the French view ketchup, or I do for that matter, versus how the Americans feel about it. Now, if ketchup is used in an advert for our product, where will you use ketchup in the scheme of things and where would you avoid it? That’s an association at play.
Humans are always trying to create a story with whatever is happening around them, and the right associations for what we sell are important. We usually know of associations like color and font, etc., but EVERYTHING is an association, and it can be diametrically opposite for the same product in front of two different target customer groups, so it has to be relevant to the targeted customer group.
By the way, in the initial days of my B2B startup, I used to think that context mattered only for consumer-based businesses, but I was wrong. They are as relevant for B2B as they are for B2C businesses, and equally for marketing and sales-driven products and services. The reason is that context is fundamental to how humans feel, and that doesn’t change.
The concept of context and its associations is not complex, and if well understood, it's simple and obvious. What gets complex is figuring out all the variables that are at play. But that is where the satisfaction is in the result of the toil!
Very Insightful!