Cultivate, Not Capture
How to move from capturing interest as a brand to cultivating it. Introducing the 4 phases of interest and exploring why the traditional ‘funnel’ falls short in cultivating interests.
Act 1: Undisclosed Desires
Small Pond Mentality
Most brands are fishing in a shrinking pond.
New rods and new delicious bait, won’t change the fact that the pond is getting smaller and smaller.
Also think of the poor fish, it must be terrible down there.
There’s a rarely challenged assumption that is quietly living within most marketing planning. Free from scrutiny, dragging down performance and becoming more expensive to fix every quarter. It’s one of the things that is helping to drain the water from the pond.
The assumption in question is the way we view interest. People either care about your brand’s category or they don’t. This means your task is to find (or fish) for the people that do care. It’s your job to make them choose you over the alternative. That’s the assumption, right?
So, at its core the equation is simple, the audience is a fixed quantity. The only variable between you and filling those nets, is your ability to persuade. Only the finest bait, I mean messaging will do!
I hope you can tell, I’m being tongue in cheek. The assumption is wrong and it has a compounding effect.
If everyone in your category is competing for the same pool of already interested people. The typical win condition is to crowd out the competition. Increase the spending, possibly undercut on price, or shout louder than the competition. Metaphorically, everything short of buying all the rods, nets and bait from the fishing supplies shop.
It doesn’t take long to see where this leads. The pool of people who already care about running shoes, watches or independent wine for example, is arguably finite. Reaching these specific pools of people is getting more expensive by the month; which is reflected in the cost of acquisition. As margins compress, the increasing pressure then leads to blame. The creative assets or the algorithm are usually first in line in the blame queue, yet the size of the pond quietly remains unchallenged.
Earlier, I mentioned the way we view interest is questionable and I would go further and say it’s a foundational point of failure. Most marketers treat it as binary, customers either have it or they don’t. This is incorrect, interest is never fixed. It shifts and develops over time. It’s like ferrofluid responding to magnets. It remains in a fluid and adaptable state, influenced by the magnetic conditions around it. Ferrofluid is famed for its reaction to magnets, the way it spikes and takes on new forms; I feel it’s representative of how we experience interest internally.
Abstract depictions of ferrofluid states aside, the research on this goes back decades. The most useful framework to understand how interest operates comes from Suzanne Hidi and K. Ann Renninger. They spent years mapping how interest forms.
Here is a snapshot of the four phase model that they developed:
1 – Triggered situational interest
A chance encounters sparks curiosity or a moment of pleasure. It’s fleeting in nature and is the essentially the base layer of interest people can have. It’s also the level of interest most awareness content will generate in people. Usually in response to a striking image, unexpected collaboration or content that raises more questions than it answers.
2 – Maintained situational interest.
This is the stage where interests aren’t triggered they’re actively sort out on a light and casual level. If the opportunity presents itself, the person won’t pass up the opportunity to indulge. The level of attention is no longer fleeting and now it’s being actively sustained on a regular basis.
3 – Emerging individual interest.
This is the next level up: the growing interests now occupy the person’s attention on a frequent basis. They go from receiving content to now actively seeking it out. The desire to engage with the interest has grown to the point where they are actively seeking it out and asking questions to deepen their understanding.
4 – Well-developed individual interest.
This is the graduation phase, a person transforms from being “interested” to now being an enthusiast, connoisseur or practitioner . The interest is now a core part of their life and may even form part of their identity or profession.
Most brands are aware of the first and last phases.
Awareness/Top of Funnel content produces ‘Triggered Situational Interest’.
Consideration/Mid funnel content serves people who already have ‘Well-developed Interest’.
The two phases in the middle, that’s where the water is being drained from the pool. Shrinking the addressable market size and increasing acquisition costs. The focus on the first and last phases neglects the middle phases where interests are nurtured and fortified into intent and desire. Neither phases 2 or 3 of the Interest model neatly align with the funnel structure. Nor are they accounted for when considering the entire customer buying journey. Paying attention to the middle phases of interest is how a small pond can be transformed into a sizeable private lake or sea.
Act 2: The Resistance
Too Much, Too Soon
Given the solution revolves around producing more content aligned with the middle phases of the interest model. There’s an objection worth addressing here.
It goes: “If we go deeper with our content, we’ll lose people. If we talk about craft, or provenance, or the technical decisions behind a product, we’ll alienate the casual audience and will come across as pretentious.”
That fear would’ve made sense twenty years ago. Based on content consumption habits in the last 5 years, it no longer make sense.
Consider what your audience does every day. They’ll likely scroll on TikTok or Instagram and get thrown into communities they never expected to join or be exposed to.
One moment it’s discussions about cinema etiquette at a film festival. The next it’s a three minute explanation of what happens if you leave out one ingredient in a chocolate chip cookie. There’s no smooth transition. People are dropped into the deep end with each scroll, and yet they still swim.
Also pay attention to how most videos open. Almost all of them start with a hook, an excerpt of the good bit, a promise of what’s coming.
That performance optimisation right there, is a confession. It’s a signal that the audience wants depth, and doesn’t want its time wasted getting there.
Here’s the key part:
Over the past 5 years, TikTok has already trained your audience to expect immersion from the outset. The audience knows what it feels like to care about something today that they didn’t care about yesterday.
So when brand content stays shallow, it doesn’t just fail to build interest. It fails to meet a standard the audience already has.
Returning to the objection, the problem isn’t that people can’t handle depth. It’s that brands don’t know how to invite people into their world of depth.
A Digger’s Paradox
In today’s fast pace digital and social landscape, brands are troubled with the challenge of engaging their audience without overwhelming them. It’s quite the balancing act and it leads many brands to take a light and cautious approach.
This fear of going too deep or too soon can lead to a common pitfall: producing content that is overly compressed and light touch with the level of depth.
Here is a personification of the fear.
There’s an interesting social phenomenon happening at the moment with the film Digger, which landed in cinemas October 2026. Before the film’s release, the trailer divided people sharply. Some saw the themes around oil and climate change and concluded the film was going to be preachy. They didn’t like the idea of being lectured by Hollywood stars, so they didn’t go. To add insult to injury, film critics didn’t look upon it favourably either.
The people who did go came out calling it one of the best films of the year. Many of them then tried to convince the first group, and found the resistance impossible to shift.
Many TikTok think pieces and discussions later, the consensus is that the trailer was too protective of the film’s actual premise. Watching reviews of the film, people are extremely cautious about not spoiling it, and with good reason too (having seen it myself). Regardless, the trailer failed to give newcomers a way in or reason to care. It signalled a level of seriousness and criticism that made people feel the film wasn’t for them, without offering anything that made them feel it might be. Ultimately, the trailer failed, and badly too, given the box office numbers.
That failure mode is exactly what most brands are afraid of. If you go deep, you’ll come across as pretentious. If you assume too much, you’ll exclude people. If you show the work, you’ll invite criticism. So there is a temptation to compress, to hold back, to simplify. Brands stay on a surface level because compression feels safe.
Spoiler alert: It isn’t.
The compression is what produces the exclusion in the first place.
A trailer that signals depth without an invitation reads as a closed door.
Content that stays shallow because it’s afraid of alienating anyone ends up giving nobody a reason to stay.
Act 3: Uprising
The New Rules of Engagement:
Let’s Cultivate, not capture!
The strategy shifts below will help move you out of the overcrowded pond and set you on a path to cultivate the interests of your audience.
It’s a proactive approach built on the assumption that interest can be grown. It doesn’t wait for the audience to self-identify their interest. It asks what conditions are needed for interest to grow? The cultivation approach grants you more agency to focus on creating conditions for more people to start caring.
Strategy Shift 1:
Stop announcing. Start inviting.
Announcement content messaging assumes interest, whereas invitational messaging does the opposite and builds interest.
The shift here is the top of your funnel should additionally be about the category, not exclusively about the brand. If someone doesn’t yet know why the subject or category matters, then they can’t care that you’ve made a new and better version of something.
We want to create curiosity gaps and nurture the early signs of interest. Content that cultivates phase-one interest often doesn’t mention your product at all, and that’s by design. Remember we’re cultivating interest, not capturing it; so the initial goal is curiosity.
Strategy Shift 2:
Adventure Time
Next we need small wins, confidence boosters and a sense of horizons being expanded.
The key is about creating entry points, challenging the audience slightly and to make them stronger and more competent.
For this strategic shift, we need content that leaves people feeling like they now, know one more thing that they didn’t know before. A secondary objective for the content is to plant the seeds of natural next steps and things to look at next.
Overall, we want to open the rabbit hole and hint that there’s more worth looking at down there.
Strategic Shift 3:
Hold the line
Next is bravery and commitment, but not from the audience. We need it from you as the brand leader or marketer leading the process.
Cultivation is a repeated act, it’s not a one off. This is a medium to long term strategy, so the attributes of success may take a while to show up in the weekly reports or the performance dashboard.
This approach requires time and commitment, so it’s your job to trust the process and be prepared to defend the content decisions to those with a conditioned to have a reactive or capture mindset.
Internally the best approach is to frame content designed to cultivate interest as it’s own category that is unburdened from the need to perform in the traditional funnel structure sense. Reoccurring formats are typically your best bet here. Regardless of the content or campaign shape, the important thing is to communicate internally, that these pieces of content are there to cultivate interest. It’s about proactively providing the brand with a platform for sustainable growth. Secure a long term funding commitment and make the content exempt from short term performance metrics.
Resist the temptation
There’s a temptation to read all of this and view it as the softer less commercial minded path. In a world that wants results yesterday, it might feel daunting to run counter to the capture mindset status quo. Based on this, I see it as my duty to leave you with a clear summary of the results the cultivation approach produces.
First, the stress of competing for the attention of the same market segment ends. Operating with a cultivation mindset will lead to reduced acquisition costs, because you’re no longer competing for the last scraps of signalled existing interest. Instead, your content starts compounding, with each new piece building the conditions for the next, rather than resetting to zero with every campaign.
You become the brand that taught people to care about something, which is a position no competitor can easily replicate, because they didn’t invest in teaching the audience and raising their level of competence.
In a capture model, your advantage is always temporary, because it can always be outspent. In a cultivation model, your advantage is the relationship itself. Relationships don’t fall as easily when rivals increase the budget.
So the argument isn’t that depth and detail beat a lighter tonal approach. It’s that interest develops in phases, and most brands are serving only the first and the last phases of the interest model.
The middle is where the opportunity to stand out exists.
The key is to recognise that care and interest is something that can also be built.
