Beyond Categories
Customer Modes, Ad Humour, Great User Design, The Extraordinary Cost of DULL, Data, data everywhere but not a drop to drink, 9 criteria for New Technology, and Zero'ing Out
Welcome to my weekend short POV, plus a roundup of interesting thinking I’ve encountered this week. Have an enjoyable weekend!
Beyond Categories
Modes Can Revolutionise Your Market
Your customers don't buy products—they hire solutions for specific moments in their lives. This simple shift in thinking can transform how you approach audience expansion and loyalty.
What Are Customer Modes?
Customer modes represent the specific contexts, mindsets, and goals that drive purchase decisions at particular moments.
Countless businesses falter by obsessing over demographic categories while missing why customers choose their products. Traditional market segmentation (age, income, location) tells you who might buy, but modes tell you why and when they buy.
A mode captures the full context of a purchase decision:
The immediate goal the customer needs to achieve
The constraints they face (time, money, knowledge)
The emotional state driving their behavior
The alternatives they're considering
Unlike rigid customer categories that label people permanently, modes recognize that the same person shifts between different decision contexts throughout the day. For example, I might be a "health-conscious shopper" at the grocery store but transform into a "convenience-seeker" during my lunch break.
McDonald's Milkshake Revelation: The Classic Mode Discovery
One of the most famous examples of identifying a customer mode comes from McDonald's, and it completely upends conventional thinking about product development.
McDonald's puzzled over how to boost milkshake sales. They tried everything the category-based playbook suggested—sweeter recipes, chunkier textures, more flavours—but saw minimal improvement.
Then researcher Clayton Christensen asked a revolutionary question: "What job are customers hiring the milkshake to do?"
The answer shocked everyone. Nearly half of all milkshakes were sold before 8 AM. These weren't desserts—they were breakfast solutions for commuters who needed:
One-handed consumption when driving
Something filling that would last through a long, boring commute
Entertainment (the thickness provided something to do during the drive)
Minimal mess compared to alternatives
This wasn't about the milkshake as a product category but the "boring commuter seeking sustenance and stimulation" mode. Once McDonald's understood this, they thickened their morning milkshakes to make them last longer during commutes, directly addressing the need. Sales rocketed.
I've seen this pattern repeatedly. Optimising for modes rather than fixed customer categories unlocks growth opportunities your competitors miss.
The Starbucks Paradox: How Ignoring Modes Erodes Value
If McDonald's represents the triumph of mode-based thinking, Starbucks offers a cautionary tale about what happens when abandoning a powerful mode position for short-term efficiency gains.
Starbucks originally built its empire by creating what they called the "third place"—neither home nor work, but somewhere comfortable in between. They had a specific customer mode:
Connection and community
A casual meeting space with minimal purchase pressure
An affordable luxury and distinct experience
A multi-sensory environment (coffee aromas, comfortable seating, ambient music)
When I started going to a Starbucks, I got a plush armchair, inhaled rich coffee aromas, and watched baristas craft drinks by hand. The experience served a distinct mode beyond just "a coffee customer."
But Starbucks shifted away from this mode-based position:
Replacing comfortable sofas with hard-backed chairs optimised for turnover
Eliminating most of the coffee aroma with sealed systems
Pushed mobile ordering to bypass human interaction
Food offerings that distracted from the core coffee experience
Standardised store designs, erasing character
They optimised for operational efficiency and volume at the expense of the specific mode it once dominated. They still sold coffee, but surrendered its unique position in the customer's mode landscape.
Many former Starbucks loyalists (like me, who never really liked their coffee) have migrated to local coffee shops that better serve their "third-place" mode, while the company struggles to differentiate itself from lower-priced competitors like Dunkin' or McDonald's. (They have recognised this and are reverting to their roots).
How to Identify and Target Customer Modes
Identifying powerful customer modes requires deeper research than traditional demographic analysis. I’d recommend these approaches:
Look for Surprising Usage Patterns
When customers use your product in unexpected ways or at unpredictable times (like McDonald's morning milkshakes), you've likely stumbled upon an unaddressed mode.
Ask Mode-Revealing Questions
Don't ask customers why they bought your product. Instead, ask:
"What were you trying to accomplish when you bought this?"
"What other solutions did you consider for this situation?"
"What would you have done if our product wasn't available?"
Map the Customer's Day
Track how your customers' contexts, goals, and constraints shift throughout their day. Each transition potentially represents a different mode you could target.
Study Workarounds
Customers who create DIY solutions or use products in unintended ways signal an unmet need.
The Future is Mode-Focused Brands
I challenge you to identify just one customer mode your business currently serves and ask: Are we genuinely optimising for this mode, or are we distracted by category conventions and efficiency metrics undermining our unique position?
The answer to that question will revolutionise your thinking.
Interesting Links
Out-of-the-Box (2-minute video)
What hinders elderly people’s regular interaction with mobile phones isn’t age or any lack of technological skills, but the clumsiness of the phone manuals. Poor design and terminology are barriers. Samsung designed a creative solution that empowered the elderly to engage more with mobile technology in a super example of human-centred design.
World-class advertising.
Brands are now using humour in many major categories. The only standout exception is in high-expense, high-risk categories. (I guess this is why skydiving businesses rarely use humour).
The Extraordinary Cost of DULL (3-minute read)
Orlando Wood asks what the role of advertising is today.
In a digitally disrupted world, brands lose their physical availability, so they lose mental availability, too. If you are an online or subscription business or want to be available in the moment, context, or mode when a consumer looks for a solution, one of the principal roles of advertising is establishing and maintaining mental availability**.
The problem is that confidence in and experience of brand-building advertising is lost today.
**If I ask you to think of an airline, you might say BA or Delta. That’s awareness. If I ask you to think of a cheap way of flying to Spain, you’ll probably say Ryanair or Easyjet. That’s salience. Salience is being top of mind for a specific need.
There’s an increasingly apparent truth to the world of data - knowing what to do with it is a very different skill set from learning how to gather it. Data, data everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Social platforms have refined this to an art. And a lie.
Views are the most visible metric on the internet. In more or less real time, you can see how many views something got on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and most other video platforms. X tracks views for every single thing you post, as does Threads. A view is the universal currency of success — more views, more fun.
But it’s all BS. Views are nothing. They’re BIG Lies. (But don’t tell the brands spending the ad money with them).
Yet we still talk about view counts; view counts are still everywhere.
Even this newsletter has “counts”. Regardless, please like me anyway.
A “view,” in reality, is not a universal metric. It’s not anything.
It’s whatever a platform wants it to be. So, it doesn’t correlate with whether someone has experienced a piece of content. You can just make the views whatever you want. And if you don’t like how the numbers look, just make views something else!
Let’s just run through a few tricks. The simplest ones to understand are the social platforms: Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts all count a view the second a video starts playing. This is absurd. Every time you scroll, even if you immediately jump to the following video, the platform logs that you watched the video, the same as if you’d seen the whole thing. That’s like saying, if you scroll past an ad playing Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, you’ve now technically seen Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Congratulations, you’re a pirate.
As you scroll on X, every post on your feed gets a view as it flows up and off your screen. Posts that appear in search results, on someone’s profile page — anything that shows up counts as “viewed.” On X, if the video plays for at least two seconds, and half of the player is in view on your screen, that counts as a view. All these videos play automatically, so we’re back to the same thing: if it loaded, you viewed it.
Netflix once clocked a view only after you’d completed 70 percent of something, which is the closest thing to tracking whether you’ve watched something of any metric I’ve mentioned so far. Now it only takes two minutes for Netflix to say you’ve watched something. Netflix picked two minutes because it’s “long enough to indicate the choice was intentional.” No, it’s not! Netflix knows how much you watched anyway! It just wants the numbers to be higher, around 35 percent higher than under the previous metric.
I'm curious. This whole list is from Wendell Berry in 1987. Yet nothing on it is obsolescent, inappropriate, dysfunctional, or harmful. Ted Gioia wishes our tech companies could say the same for their work.
Ted Gioia's full article is here (4-minute read, no paywall)
The always-on is about to get some time off. An essay unpacking how a growing desire for absence and silence will change what we expect from the brands in our lives.
30-minute read
Hype leads to stress or overwhelm, distraction from core goals, poor decision-making, and ultimately burnout. Yet, the same phenomenon creates the energy, engagement, and positive momentum necessary for further innovation and risk-taking.
Enjoy your weekend!
See you mid-week with my normal deep dive.
Michael