Editorial
The Gist
- Understanding shopping modes. Recognizing that consumers enter various modes while shopping can enhance personalization strategies and drive engagement.
- Data-driven insights. Gathering contextual data, such as location and time, is crucial for identifying consumer shopping behavior and tailoring marketing efforts effectively.
- Mapping customer experiences. Mode mapping allows businesses to visualize consumer situations and tailor buying experiences to support different shopping behaviors.
In my first article in this series, I laid out an approach for identifying the modes that people get into, and I introduced the idea of a mode map.
For part two, I’d like to apply mode map thinking to a particular experience that almost everyone can relate to: shopping. Certainly this approach to mapping customer needs can apply to other business activities, but since purchasing is such a universal experience, let’s examine mode mapping through the lens of a seller trying to understand consumer shopping behavior.
A mode is a mindset and a set of behaviors that a person temporarily adopts in a specific situation. Shopping mode is a common experience. What’s interesting about shopping behavior today is that people buy things while they are in modes that seemingly have nothing to do with buying. I will explain how they can do that shortly.
Because companies that 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:
- 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 associate with these different situations? And how do these modes relate to your solution?
- Discover: Second, companies need to find new opportunities for supporting modes that matter to customers. Discovering these opportunities requires deeper exploration with customers.
- Define: Finally, define the strategy and implementation approach to show how you can close the gap between your capabilities and the customers’ modes.
Stage One: Assess Consumer Shopping Behavior
When developing a mode-driven buying strategy, perform two key steps. First, gather all customer data and insights available that may explain common scenarios customers encounter in the buying process. Also identify any data or insights you have regarding the modes that people adopt when buying.
At the end of the first step, you should have a preliminary list of common situations that customers are likely to experience, a list of modes and potential data sources to choose from. You may need to conduct some qualitative field work to make sure the situations and modes are accurate insights into consumer shopping behavior.
For example, a retailer might create two lists: common situations and modes that they know their customers adopt, as shown in the table below. Of course, you can imagine longer lists.
The second step is to evaluate your company’s ability to collect contextual data that can be used to determine what mode the customer is likely to adopt. Data might include location (i.e., in the car, at home, in the store), time of day (i.e, morning, noon, dinner time), day of the week, season, weather, travel activity, important dates, relationships and life events (i.e., new baby, new job, marriage, divorce). Collecting this kind of data helps you determine more about the individual’s situation 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% increase in non-brand mobile books, which led to a 115% increase in non-brand mobile investment
- 650% increase in share-of-voice for key travel search queries
- 375% increase in conversion rate
- 60% increase in bookings across non-brand campaigns
- 98% 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.”
The assessment stage gives you a clear sense for what your organization will need to do to leverage buying modes.
Related Article: How to Leverage Customer Insights to Shape Product Strategy and Growth
Stage Two: Uncover Insights About Consumers
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 experienced strategists start studying customer modes and consumer shopping behavior.
Here’s how to discover those opportunities:
- Learn everything you can about your customers’ common situations and buying modes. Through observation, quantitative studies and data gathering, you can study both positive and negative modes that people adopt. Identify the common patterns in your customers' situations and mindsets.
- 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.
- Develop a map of your customer’s most common situations and modes to visualize how your customers behave.
At the end of the discovery stage, you should have the inputs and insights that highlight the situations with the greatest potential for opportunity. For example, your inputs might look something like this:
Here, key situations and modes are identified, and the strategist can determine their frequency through research and decide where their priorities must be. The next level of discovery is to determine when buying is likely to occur. We can determine this by researching the alignment between situations and modes. We can also determine if there is a likelihood that people will want to buy things when they're in these modes.
The chart below is the modern-day version of Underhill’s “butt brush” finding. In the 1990s, Underhill observed that people — especially women — who brushed up against shelving, another customer or anything else were much more likely to stop purchasing and leave the store.
In this map, we can see both opportunities to support buying and scenarios where buying will stop. First, we map whether or not people adopt 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 modes/situations where no buying is likely to occur (\). The final step is to identify key mode opportunities to support. In this map, these are shown by a blue circle.
Although the data in this chart is for illustration purposes only, it’s a good example. 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, there’s a good chance that they will be prime for buying and that they will be in either a positive buying mode or a negative one.
Related Article: The Untapped Potential of Real-Time Voice of Customer Insights
What Mode Maps Tell Us About Consumer Shopping Behavior
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 buying today happens whenever and wherever the customer wants. While you certainly can include shopping situations — like 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 customer 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 in 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, and they may resume their experience and buy the product.
Also note that modes range from extremely positive to extremely negative, and 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 to encourage buying, help customers and understand 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.
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Perhaps the most important insight here is that there are many, many opportunities to support meaningful buying that go well beyond traditional purchase path touchpoints — be they in real life or online. Of course, you want to encourage positive buying modes and minimize negative ones.
owever, as a seller you can do so much more by developing purchasing solutions that support the common modes people adopt.
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