Chapter Six: People Spend Most of Their Time in Modes
Introductory Section
Dear Friends,
This is the first post of the second section of the Experience Strategy book. You will note some changes. At the beginning of each chapter I will include an objective and a chapter summary—like I have for the previous chapters. But then I will also include a strategic point of view table that you can use as a starting point to build your company’s point of view regarding the topic. And I will quickly show how the topic relates to the four principles of experience strategy.
That’s a lot of upfront summarizing. Each part will help you as we dive deeper into the topics.
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Chapter Six: People Spend Most of Their Time in Modes
Chapter Objective
My objective with this chapter is to reveal a phenomenon so ridiculously obvious you are going to smack your head and say to your team, “It’s been there in front of our noses all this time!” You get into modes. Your customers get into modes. You should be engaging with your customers through modes and creating demand for your offerings with modes. Let’s dive in.
Chapter Summary
A mode is a mindset and a set of behaviors that a person gets into temporarily.
Modes are not habits, routines, or moments. They are temporary states that people intuitively understand. They help people adapt to a wide variety of situations and needs.
People create their own modes to increase their performance or to overcome difficulties.
Great companies who include features that support customer modes are already creating value. As intelligent solutions advance, more companies will join in.
A focus on modes can dramatically improve a company’s ability to individualize experiences for customers and employees.
How Modes Relate to the Four Principles of Experience Strategy
People get into modes to address their situational need. The situation is the market and the mode is often the customer’s response to the market. Therefore, when you know the customer’s situation and you know what mode they are in, you have powerful insights into their behavior and the ability to help anyone in a similar situation, which helps you grow that market.
While your competitors seek to engage customers through ‘moment’ design, you can become compelling to your new markets by customizing your solutions to the modes they get into. By paying attention to changes in customers modes, you can stay ahead of your competitors.
Supporting modes that people get into when they hire your company will help your customer get functional, emotional, social, and aspirational jobs done the way they want to—and in a way fits the situation they find themselves in. That is why customizing based on modes is almost always more important than customizing based on preferences.
If you cannot get people to spend time with your solutions, then you are creating no time value. There is more time value for customers when you support their modes. Therefore, if you want to increase time value—whether that be time saved, spent, or invested—support their modes.
The Power of Modes
It was a cold January evening. Our research team was in Denver with Angi, who had agreed to participate in an in-home research study. The lead researcher was setting her up with a pair of glasses that had a wire attached to a portable hard-drive she could clip to her belt. This system would track her eye movements while recording everything she saw and everything she said.
She could go anywhere and do anything. The data would upload to a computer and be analyzed the next day. But for now, Angi had one concern: getting dinner on the table. Two of her bright, hungry kids—a boy and a girl—were sitting at the table playing and ready for some fuel. Her husband walked in the door. Angi, a medical researcher, wife, and mother of three, had only arrived home 30 minutes earlier. In two hours, she would be headed back out the door, kids in tow, to basketball practice.
This was prime time for Angi. She was on. As the camera rolled, Angi went to work hovering over the stove one minute, helping a child with homework the next, all while talking to her husband about schedules. The TV was on and she was using the remote to hear a program in the living room. The dog ran in and out. And, while Angi kept everything moving, she sometimes sat briefly at her kitchen table and searched for flights to Orlando. Instead of reviewing emails and documents from work that evening, she substituted another activity she needed to get done: planning the family vacation.
In the 90 minutes that the camera rolled, the family ate dinner (and loved the meal), the program on TV ended as did the homework, the kids got ready for their evening activities and Angi, who was nonchalant about the seemingly busy night, researched and made decisions about a family vacation. At no time did she seem especially stressed or upset by the pace. This was a typical evening for her, except for the eyeglasses that tracked her every move.
While your life may contain different details, you’re probably a lot like Angi. This level of multitasking is common. We do it all the time. But how do we do it? Yes, there is technology that supports us, but there’s more going on under the surface.
The researcher asked Angi to say something out loud every time she felt a change in activity. She was asked to name the “mode” she was in. At first Angi didn’t understand what a mode was. She said, “Do you mean what gear I’m in?” “Yes,” he replied. And so she narrated her movements. “I’m in socializing mode,” “I’m in planning mode,” “I’m in browsing mode,” “I’m back in learning mode,” she said, naturally switching modes around every two to three minutes. And she stayed in these modes while she cooked, conversed, and tended to the needs of the kids and dog—which could be defined as “caring mode.” Consider this period, one hour and 16 minutes into the study, as recounted in the researcher’s post-observation analysis: “Continues to watch TV from upstairs hall while she waits for her child to stop having a tantrum. Gets the child in bath, cleans the kitchen.” All of this activity is normal for Angi and she’s extremely good at it, precisely because she knows how to get into (and out of) many different modes. In fact, she uses modes to help her accomplish things almost simultaneously during peak times in her daily activities.
Experts in human behavior and the companies that follow their work focus heavily on habits, routines, moments, and mindsets to explain how people do what they do today. What they are missing is the role that modes play in people’s lives.
A mode is a mindset and a set of behaviors that a person gets into temporarily. People increasingly rely on modes to help them get multiple jobs done. And modes are perfect for a variety of unique situations that arise all the time—like when you are trying to get dinner ready and watch something on TV, but your youngest child is having a tantrum. No well-formed habit, regular routine, or moment can properly address that unique situation. But “patiently-waiting-mommy mode” can, as Angi so astutely showed (while also being in three other modes almost simultaneously).
Modes are not the future of engagement. Modes are how people engage now, in this modern moment. And the more you understand modes, the more you will understand the people you seek to serve.
From Beast Mode to Goblin Mode
While people have always gotten into modes, it’s only a recently that naming modes has become popular, with some modes even going viral. Credit goes to videogames and apps for the proliferation of named modes. To illuminate how important modes have become, consider two of the most popular ones: beast mode and goblin mode.
The term “beast mode” likely originated with the 1996 animated series Beast Wars. Or it may have been birthed by the 1988 Sega video game Altered Beasts. But it was Marshawn Lynch (AKA “Beast Mode”) who made the term what it is today. During his first season with the Seattle Seahawks, the running back from Oakland, California, catapulted to fame. In a wild-card game against the New Orleans Saints, Lynch became a legend and a superhero. With the ball in hand, “Beast Mode” hit the line, bounced off it, and then scrambled 67 yards for a touchdown. From then on, everyone knew what the term “beast mode” meant. It is the ability to turn on advanced skills, power, or focus to accomplish a task. When someone is facing a challenge that is extremely difficult, they need their beast mode to power up. Lynch trademarked the term, but almost 10 years later the hashtag #BeastMode shows up at least 500,000 times a year on X. It’s a part of the way many people speak and think.
The most talked-about mode of 2022 was exactly the opposite: goblin mode. In fact, goblin mode as a term was so popular that the Oxford English Dictionary crowned it the 2022 word of the year. After two years of pandemic living, much of which required people to stay home, goblin mode became the rallying cry for those who wanted to push back on the so-called “perfect girl mystique.” Being in goblin mode refers to the comforts of being a slob, of not going out and doing amazing things, but instead embracing your inner I-don’t-care-what-I-look-like-or-if-I-do-anything-worthwhile-today self.
A fake headline for an article on Reddit read: Julia Fox opened up about her ‘difficult’ relationship with Kanye West: “He didn’t like when I went goblin mode.” Published February 16, 2022, the fake news story went viral, and Fox felt compelled to post on Instagram that she had never, ever used the term ‘goblin mode.’ It didn’t matter; she will forever be the face that launched the goblin mode ships. Quickly the term morphed into a commentary on all the shiny-faced, perfectly coifed, every-thing-in-place photos that get posted on social media. When you are in goblin mode, you really do not care about image, productivity, or even great entertainment. You are happy with Cheez Whiz, Reddit rabbit holes, and oversized, somewhat grimy T-shirts. You are not “that girl.”
Even if “modes” were only a social media phenomenon they would still be important for companies and individuals to understand. They are not just old ideas wrapped up in new slang. People now identify their altering states of being with modes. And those who have an interest in helping people embrace their lives more fully, should — actually, must — be paying close attention to the modes their customers, their friends, and their selves get into.
To be continue …