Are Retailers Wasting Their Data and Time? Focus on Modes

A new article in Retail Touch Points

Dear Friends,

Today’s post is an article that I wrote for Retail Touch Points, that was just published on Friday. As I say in the first line of the article, analyzing customer data can be hard. Predicting future purchases is not easy. But retailers would be far more successful if they focused on customer modes rather than customer preferences.

A mode is a mindset and a set of behaviors that people get into temporarily. So, we can go shopping but be in crisis mode and that will affect our decision-making. While at another time we may be in high performance mode, which will of course affect our decision-making. You can see how companies who study customer preferences to encourage buying but don’t fully understand the customer’s situation would be blind to modes, right?

To think that a customer prefers to purchase in a certain way without considering the impact of the customer’s mode on decision-making is foolhardy.

Here’s the article. I hope you enjoy. I’ll be covering modes in detail in Chapter 6.