What is A Buying Mode & How Do You Support it?
Chapter 6: People Spend Most of Their Time in Modes
Dear Friends,
This post is part one of a two-part article. I was asked by Harvard Business Review to write a piece on buying modes. They never published it. But now you have the entire article. Portions of this article have been published in other outlets. Enjoy!
What is A Buying Mode & How Do You Support it?
Brands spend considerable time and money building purchase experiences for customers. But most of these experiences do not support the customers’ situations (or the contextual requirements that accompany the wide variety of settings where buying is possible). So, buying a milkshake in the morning could be a very different experience for the customer than buying a milkshake after dinner. Situations are what drive so much purchasing. To support customer situations, focus your purchase experience strategy on modes.
Modes are a temporary and, increasingly, intentional state of engagement consisting of a mindset and behaviors associated with certain actions and activities performed for a short period of time. They are not habits, routines, or moments. Some modes are positive; some are negative. Companies can create more meaningful, customized buying opportunities by understanding the modes that their customers get into.
There is a wide gap between what sellers think their customers do and what people who are buying actually do. While companies spend considerable time, resources, and energy chasing their customers, people find themselves in common settings without support for those situations. While companies focus on personalizing the buying experience for their customers, people build their customized buying experiences. And while companies look to new technologies to give them a better understanding of their buyers, people are constantly giving off signals that these tools are not designed to read.
To increase purchases, companies must better manage the experiences surrounding buying situations they cannot completely control. Marketers and experience strategists need to better understand customer situations and then customize the purchasing experience in ways that align with situational customer needs. Increasingly, the way people manage their lives and their situational needs is by getting into modes.
Many buying strategists believe that eliminating friction from the purchase experience is the best way to increase sales. Meanwhile, the buyer is getting into modes. A mode is a temporary state of being that could be positive or negative. The customer’s mode could support buying or make buying impossible. While the experience strategist focuses on moments, journeys, routines, and habits, the buyer is creating more and more buying conducive modes for their lives.
Are your customers getting into modes? Of course they are. And you can engage with them through their modes. You can can customize the purchase experience to their modes. Doing so will help you understand them better and adjust your solutions to the situations they find themselves in. Doing so will close the gap between seller and buyer.
The Situation
In 1999, Paco Underhill published his seminal work Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, which introducednew terms such as ‘butt brush;’ and new research techniques like video observation and analysis. Underhill’s approach to increasing purchase activity helped many retailers make decisions regarding where to position merchandise, how wide the aisles of stores should be, and how to identify different types of shopping ‘missions.’
To Underhill the science of buying should be focused on “the study of shoppers in situ.[i]” People make purchase decisions based on their situation, the things that are going on around them, and the subtle clues of their environment that they experience. While Underhill’s research work related to a different time and was focused on brick-and-mortar stores, his basic argument stands. People still make their purchase decisions today based on their circumstances, situations, and context.
Many sellers no longer control the physical environments in which purchase decisions are made. So, companies have moved away from understanding customer situations and purchasing contexts, focusing instead on traditional data, like demographics and psychographics or ‘new’ digital behavioral data, to help them understand their customers’ decision-making in hopes of customizing the buying experience to the customer. Most of these ‘customer customization’ approaches strip out any situational data and instead try to capture preferences. Yet, a focus of a customer’s situation is a far better way to customize the purchase experience than a focus on preferences. Just as Underhill was able to observe how people responded in retail situations twenty-five years ago, we can see how people respond to all kinds of situations today. We can see that they manage their lives, their needs, and their use of technology by getting into modes.
The purpose of this article is to: First, to explain what modes are and why they matter, including how people get into modes that support their situations. Second, to show how companies can identify and custom-design solutions that align with customer modes to encourage meaningful purchase decisions. In support of these objectives, I provide a framework to help marketing and experience strategists identify the modes that are most important to their company and their customers. I also provide several case studies from research conducted by my team at experience strategy consultancy Stone Mantel as well as by others that illustrate the properties of buying modes and how to support customers in making meaningful purchases.
What is a Mode?
You hear the term regularly. People say they are in beast mode, mommy mode, remote work mode, or vacation mode. In 2022 the Oxford Dictionary word of the year was ‘gremlin mode,’ a temporary, but very intentional way of celebrating a messy bedroom, lifestyle, or social media look. Over the past five years, the word ‘mode’ has increased 2000 percent on Google searches. People use it to refer to a temporary state of engagement that they ‘get into.’ A mode is a mindset and set of behaviors that people get into temporarily. People enter different modes because these modes (e.g., learning mode, exercise mode, etc.) help them maximize their impact (e.g., effectiveness, productivity, etc.) in various situations they encounter. Sometimes, getting into modes is a passive response to situations, such as procrastination mode, but frequently it is a proactive activity, such as ‘get-it-done mode.’ People we’ve studied take time to think about and plan their modes. They talk openly, often on social media, about the modes they are in and why.
Modes are not moments. They are not habits. And they are not preferences. A moment is a period of time. A habit is a regular practice that someone adopts, often permanently, and can be hard to give up. A preference is a greater liking for one thing over another.
Again, a mode is a state of being that people get into temporarily. While a habit is an almost automatic response to a trigger, a mode is easily adapted to the unique circumstances that a person finds themselves in. Being in vacation mode in Hawaii with the family is likely a different experience than being in vacation mode in Luxembourg between business meetings. Moreover, a habit imposes similar patterns on different situations, while modes are plentiful and easily adapted to the situation.
A preference predicts what the individual will likely desire in the future, but a mode predicts what the individual will likely need the next time they are in a similar situation. This is extremely important. Companies continue to mine data for customer preferences so that they can customize experiences. Yet, preference data can only take you so far, and it is often not effective in predicting future buying behavior. Modes have a predictive power preferences do not. For example, if a person buys a swimsuit and the company focuses exclusively on the person’s preferences to predict future purchases, they are likely to show similar swimsuits the next time the customer returns to buy from them. But ifthe company knows that the customer is buying the swimsuit because she is soon to be in Hawaii vacation mode, well, then there are all kinds of additional things she may need for the trip. And if the swimsuit is bought while the customer is in Hawaii vacation mode, it’s very likely that she is in a mode that is conducive to even more purchases. She’s likely in a ‘buying mode.’
Of moods, missions, and modes
You might be asking right now if a mode is just another name for a mood or a shopper mission. A mood is a temporary state of mind or feeling, while a shopper mission, as many retailers understand the word, is a goal for a particular buying journey, often with key behaviors associated with the task. Both are related to modes and, for the customer, there can be overlapping experiences. Moods, missions, and modes are common responses to situations. Certain moods are associated with certain modes—think: ‘sad mode,’ ‘decompression mode,’ or ‘chill mode’—as are most shopper missions, like: ‘weekly dinner shopping mode,’ or ‘binge buying mode.’ While all mission situations can be experienced as modes (e.g., stock up shopping mode, distress purchase mode), there are many, many more situations that can be experienced as modes (e.g., road trip mode, road trip planning mode, family time mode, and on and on), and therefore more buying opportunities, than there are shopper missions.
The second difference between missions and modes is that missions connote to the strategist a related type of linear shopping journey. There’s a sequence of activities that strategists believe customers are likely to follow. People, as we will see later in the case studies, get into modes in large part because they don’t have to follow a linear sequence.
To explain the difference between modes and moods, let’s consider the first academically documented mode: flow. Renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described flow as ‘a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it[ii].’ Flow happens to people who are performing at their personal peak levels. In sports, Tom Brady and Lebron James have both described what flow does for their tremendous abilities, with James referring to it as ‘championship mode.’ It’s the same experience.
Whereas a mood is a short-lived emotional state that often lacks a reason, a mode has tailored activities associated with it. High-performance modes, like ‘championship mode,’ require years of effort, talent, and concentration before the individual can ‘get into’ them. Low-performance modes such as ‘anxiety mode,’ or even ‘chill mode,’ still involve tailored activities and behaviors that are defined by the individual to the situation. A bad mood does not describe the activities, behaviors, or the situation. A negative mode does. So, if someone says, “I’m sad today.” They are describing their feelings. But if they say, “I’m in sad girl mode right now,” they are describing a state of being that they feel is tailored to the situation. In one instance on social media, a woman put on lipstick and gave herself a ‘goth’ look so that everyone could see her ‘sad girl mode.’ She was actively designing her negative mode, something you cannot do with a mood.
We have found in our research that people get into a wide range of positive, negative, high-performance and low-performance modes on a weekly basis. And people are increasingly aware of and actively designing the modes they get into so that they can maximize positive situations and minimize negative ones.
What is a buying mode?
A buying mode is any mode that an individual gets into where the mindset and behaviors of the individual are conducive to buying. The most obvious buying modes are ‘buying mode’ (of course!), ‘shopping mode,’ ‘browsing mode,’ ‘spending mode,’—all of which may very well be the same mode for any particular individual. (People will often use a variety of descriptors for the same mode.)
In addition to obvious buying modes, there are many modes that people get into that are not directly about buying something but for which buying may very well happen. A mom we interviewed noted that she often buys things when she is in waiting mode. While she waits for her kids at school pick up or between practices, she goes online on her phone and shops. In fact, her ideal waiting experience involves buying things. For another woman we interviewed, shopping is most enjoyable while she watches TV. Thus, her buying mode and her entertainment modes are often merged.
At first glance, it may seem like both women are just multitasking. Doing one thing while doing another thing often leads to reduced productivity. And retailers fear the lack of focus on the purchase process. But these women were intentionally designing their waiting or relaxing time. They were purposefully combining activities to maximize the value of the time spent. Shopping online and waiting in a car for kids fit nicely together for the first woman. Shopping online while watching TV was more relaxing for the second woman than doing each activity separately. Both were getting into modes to maximize the situation at hand.
Saying that they were just multitasking misses the point. They valued being able to combine the two activities. And they could easily start and stop what they were doing, picking up where they left off at a later time. Their smart phones enabled the merging of two modes by providing apps that queued their activity.
Technology is a key reason why people today refer to themselves as getting into modes. Not only do many smart tools customize the experience for users using features called modes, but smart tools enable people to queue their activities so that they can return to them later. This means that in most cases, buying modes and modes that they can easily combine with buying modes will be started and stopped throughout the purchase journey. When the kids come running out of school, the parent who was just shopping for a new bedroom set will stop and focus on getting the children home, then resume the activity later—perhaps the next day. Habits, routines, multitasking, moods, and moments do not capture this type of temporary engagement. Modes do.
Maximizing Their Situations
Getting into modes helps people maximize situations and improve their performance. But not always. Sometimes people are in negative modes. In most cases, they don’t want to stay in these negative states. In general, they want to 1. Improve their performance or 2. Minimize the impact of low performance situations. They also want 3. To maintain a positive state of engagement or 4. Address a negative state of engagement.
We can map modes people/consumers get into based on the following quadrants: high performance, positive state; low performance, positive state; high performance, negative state; low performance, negative state. Examples of modes for these states are provided below:
Conscientious sellers are likely to design buying experiences that help people who are in reflexive buying modes, perhaps because they are also in deadline mode or binging mode, to pause, relax, or take a breath and get into a more positive mode of recovery that is conducive with recreational buying modes. Or they may look for signs that their customers are in symptomatic buying modes and find ways to encourage their customers to strengthen themselves through positive/high performance modes (like learning, creating, or family time), or smart buying modes. By doing so, they increase the meaningfulness of the purchases.
Developing a Purchase Experience Strategy to Leverage Modes
The goal of a seller should be to customize the purchase experience to the individual’s situation (not just preferences) so that the individual can make meaningful purchases (e.g. when I am in a hurry to get to a birthday party and need a gift). By identifying the modes that are most likely to fit important situations, the company can think strategically about purchase behavior and design purchase experiences that matter. They can create time well spent[i]for the purchaser.
Because companies who focus on customer modes are harnessing the way that people temporarily engage to create powerful personal experiences, focusing on modes in your buying strategy creates tremendous new selling opportunities. There are three stages to developing a purchase experience strategy that leverages modes. I elaborate these stages and provide tools for their implementation below.
1. Assess: First, you need to assess your data and customer insights. Do you have the tools to evaluate and prioritize different situations that people find themselves in? Can you identify what modes they associated with key situations that they find themselves in—and that relate to your solution?
2. Discover: Second, companies need to find new opportunities for supporting modes that matter to customers. To discover these opportunities requires exploration with customers.
3. Define: The final stage is to define the strategy and implementation approach for showing how you can close the gap between your capabilities and the customers’ modes.
Stage One: Assess
When developing a mode-driven buying strategy, perform these two steps:
1. First, gather all data and customer insights available to the company that may explain common situations customers find themselves in when buying. Then identify any data or insights you have regarding the modes that people get into when buying.
2. Second, evaluate your ability to gather situational or contextual data.
At the end of the first step of Assess you should have a preliminary list of common situations that customers are likely to experience, a list of modes, and potential data sources to size from. You may need to conduct some qualitative field work to ensure the situations and modes are real.
For example, a retailer might create two lists: common situations and modes that they know their customers get into as shown in the table below. Of course, you can imagine longer lists.
The second step of Assess is to evaluate your company’s ability to collect contextual data that can be used to determine what mode the customer is likely to be in. Data might include location (in the car, at home, in the store), time of day (morning, noon, dinner time), day of the week (weekday, weekend), seasons and weather, travel activity, important dates, relationships (parents, children, friends), and life events (new baby, new job, marriage, divorce). Collecting this kind of data helps you determine more about the situation that the individual might be in and what modes are important.
During the early years of data-driven mobile advertising, Red Roof Inn showed the value of the first two steps. Unable to match the search budgets of their bigger competitors, the hotelier learned to capture contextual data (Step 1) about a key situation that people often find themselves in: flight cancellations due to weather disruptions. Using search data, flight data, weather data, geodata, time of day, and other indicators (Step 2), Red Roof Inn was able to identify when these situations occurred and send mobile notifications to people who were likely in negative modes. Because they were first, the results were incredible:
266 percent increase in non-brand mobile books, which led to a 115 precent increase in non-brand mobile investment
650 percent increase in share-of-voice for key travel search queries
375 percent increase in conversion rate; 60 percent books lift across non-brand campaigns
98 percent increase in CTR across non-brand campaigns
With far fewer resources, Red Roof Inn reached and converted customers who, by their own admission, “would otherwise be unattainable[ii].”
The Assess Stage gives you a clear sense for what your organization will need to do to leverage buying modes.
Stage Two: Discover
The next stage is to find the buying mode opportunities that matter most to your customers and your company. No matter how much you already know about your customers and their decision-making, there are new things to discover when experience strategists focus start studying customer modes. Here’s how to discover those opportunities.
1. First, learn everything you can about your customers’ common situations and buying modes. Through observation, quantitative, and data gathering, study both positive modes and negative modes that people get into. Learn about the commonalities between situations and modes for your customers.
2. Determine the frequency of buying modes. Remember, many buying modes actually happen in situations that may not have much to do with going to a store or an app to make a purchase.
3. Last, develop a map of your customer’s most common situations and modes that shows how your customers behave.
At the end of your Discover stage you should have inputs that support the situations that offer the most opportunity. For example, your inputs might include the following table:
Here, common, important situations and modes are identified, and, through research, their frequency is determined, providing the strategist with a first level of prioritization. The next level of discovery is to determine when buying is likely to occur. We can determine through research the alignment between situations and modes. We can also determine if there is a likelihood that people will want to buy things when in these modes.
The chart below is the modern-day version of Underhill’s ‘butt brush’ finding. In the 90s, Underhill observed that people—especially women—who somehow brushed up against shelving, another customer, or anything else were much more likely to stop purchasing and leave the store. In this map I we can see both opportunities for supporting buying and scenarios where buying will stop. First, we map whether or not people get into important modes while they are in important situations. If they do, the box is yellow. If they don’t, the box is empty. Second, we map whether or not the mode/situation is conducive to buying. If the mode/situation is conducive to positive buying modes then we add a plus (+). If the mode/situation is conducive to negative buying modes then we add a minus (-). We can also call out mode/situations where no buying is likely to occur (\). The final step is to identify key mode opportunities to support. In this map they are shown by a blue circle.
Although, the data in this chart is for illustration purposes only, it’s easy to imagine that if a customer is helping a family member (the situation) and in a parenting mode, then they will stop buying.
By the same token, if a customer is in work mode while traveling, according to this map there’s a good likelihood that they will be prime for buying, and in either a positive buying mode or a negative one.
I chose these situations and modes to explain how to use a mode map. You will note several things that I’ve included. First, most of the situations have very little to do with the actual act of shopping. That’s because so much of buying today happens whenever and wherever the customer wants. While you certainly can include shopping situations (e.g., when people are in the store and can’t find an item), this approach allows you to create logic for modern dilemmas many strategists face. For example, a key question that many retailers cannot answer is why an online shopping cart was abandoned. Traditional journey work would suggest that there was friction in the purchase experience that caused the customer to abandon the purchase. But if the retailer knew that many people who were in a researching mode close to dinner time stopped, another answer presents itself. When people are hungry and returning home, they do not research. After they eat, they may be likely to return to researching mode, while watching TV. Then the buying of a product the retailer carries might resume.
Also note that modes range from extremely positive to extremely negative, they are named as emotions, activities, mindsets, behaviors, or other common terms. Customers get to decide what they name their modes. Companies should try first to capture what people are experiencing rather than use in-house or clinical jargon to describe the modes. Companies who only support positive modes will miss opportunities for encouraging buying, for helping customers, and for seeing the complete picture of purchase behavior. The mode map above is a much more effective tool than the traditional, linear purchase journey map, which tends to focus on size of funnel, progressive decision-making, and keeping the customer constantly engaged with buying.
The third, and perhaps most important, insight is that there are many, many opportunities to support meaningful buying that go well beyond traditional purchase path touchpoints—be they IRL or digital. Of course, you are going to support positive buying modes and reduce time in negative one, but as a seller you can do so much more by developing purchasing solutions that support the modes people get into.
Stage 3: Define
Stage three has one primary activity: turning discovered insights and data into a strategy. To accomplish this, the strategist will review the data and develop recommendations on where the company should focus. In this case, the retailing strategist identifies five opportunity modes to support. They are: learning mode, get-it-done mode, parenting modes (both positive and negative states), researching mode, and anxious mode. The strategist who focuses solely on positive or high-performance modes will miss opportunities to have a meaningful impact on people’s lives.
The strategist focuses on how to customize the purchase to important situations by targeting the mode, not the person’s preferences. The strategy might look something like this:
____
An example of a modes-based buying strategy
Discover Insight: Retailer X can increase meaningful purchases by customizing the purchase experience for people who are in the following modes:
buying mode
learning mode
get-it-done mode
parenting modes (both positive and negative states)
researching mode
anxious mode
These modes are states of engagement that our customers get into frequently, each week, and across multiple important situations where buying occurs.
Strategy
At Retailer X, we help families and individuals make more meaningful purchases by customizing the experience so that purchasers spend less time in reflexive or symptomatic buying modes and more time in smart or recreational buying modes.
We will build channels, tools, features, and programs that allow customers to adjust their purchase experiences based on their situational needs and modes.
Retail X’s Roadmap to Success:
At Retail X, we have the delivery channels and programs needed to accomplish our goals. But we lack the ability to identify when individuals are in key modes. Further, we cannot currently customize the experience to meet important situations. Therefore, our short-term goals are to do the following:
Start with a few modes: buying, learning, get-it-done.
Create intelligent tools that allow people to quickly signal their mode to the tool.
Develop analytic capabilities to evaluate these and future modes by situation.
Train employees to observe for specific modes and recommend solutions that will enhance the experience for the individual.
[i] Norton, David W., B. Joseph Pine II. “Unique Experiences: Disruptive Innovations Offer Customers more ‘Time Well Spent.’” Strategy & Leadership 6 November 2009.
[ii] Red Roof Inn Turns Flight Cancellations into Customer. Case Study. 2014 MMA Smarties Gold Winner Mobile Search
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