Forget Habits, Preferences, and Demographics—Tap Into Consumer ‘Modes’

Many marketing strategists believe increasing ad spend is the best way to raise awareness and conversion. This blanket approach to messaging attempts to find the venues with the most eyeballs and tell the most compelling stories. But if there is one lesson to be learned from the last decade, people respond far better to messaging targeted to their needs. And needs arise from the situations people find themselves in.

Let me restate that: People respond far better, purchase more often, and remain more loyal when marketers design campaigns that are targeted to their situations. Not to their personalities. Not to their preferences. And not necessarily to their past purchase behavior.

Consumers today have access to powerful tools that help them manage their situational needs. They also have new behavioral attributes that help them manage their ever-changing situations and powerful tools. They get into “modes.”

A mode is a mindset and a set of behaviors that people get into temporarily. Think mommy mode, work mode, beast mode, and so on. Unlike habits or routines, modes are tailored to the situation at hand. And people use their technologies to help them stay in modes, or, when the mode is negative, to get them out of it. The brands that understand consumer modes can effectively target the mode and support the buying process of anyone who is in that mode.

Ten years ago, Red Roof Inn was completely outmatched in online search advertising. The hotelier’s competitors—Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt—could outspend the company hands down. With no way to break through using purchase power, the marketers at Red Roof Inn did something extraordinary. They figured out how to target ad spending to situations when people’s flights were canceled.

When your flight is canceled, there is an immediate need that arises from the situation. And almost all people get into negative mode. Crisis mode, wait-and-see mode, and recovery mode—all of which are part of canceled flight mode.

What Red Roof Inn did so effectively was use simple data about flight cancellations to send tailored mobile ads to people who were likely affected, leveraging search data, flight data, weather data, geodata, time of day, and other indicators. Because they were first, the results were incredible.

With far fewer resources, Red Roof Inn reached and converted customers who, by their admission, “would otherwise be unattainable.”

Think about how radical this approach to ad spending is. There was no awareness phase, no interest phase, no consideration phase—there was just an identified need, an understanding of the situation in real-time, and support for the mode that people were in. Now, you might say, that’s because they are in a crisis so decision-making goes out the window. Maybe. But I don’t think so. I think Red Roof Inn tapped into the magic of modes.

More on modes

In 2022, the Oxford Dictionary word of the year was “goblin 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% on Google searches. People use it to refer to a temporary state of engagement that they “get into.” People enter different modes because they help them maximize their impact, effectiveness, or productivity 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. People 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 habits: 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.

Modes are not preferences: 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 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 predictive power preferences that do not. For example, if a person buys a swimsuit, a brand is likely to show similar swimsuits the next time she returns to buy from them. But if the company knows that the customer is buying the swimsuit because she is soon to be in Hawaii vacation mode, then there are all kinds of additional things she may need for the trip. And if the swimsuit is bought while the customer is already in Hawaii vacation mode, she is likely in a mode that is conducive to even more purchases. 

In today’s fast-paced and complex world, where advertisers are looking to build engagement with specific people—and in a marketplace saturated with data—what matters most is being able to align the right message with the right situation. And there is no better way to do that than to understand consumers’ modes, which provide clarity about what data matters. Understanding modes helps marketers understand the real-time (in situ) needs of people. When advertisers focus on areas besides modes (like demographics, preferences, habits, pain points, and moments), the companies they support miss out on an important opportunity to engage people where they need it when they need it.