Modes — The Missing Variable Between Situation and Personalization
The Experience Strategy Podcast
Release Date: 09/18/2026
Modes — The Missing Variable Between Situation and Personalization
The Experience Strategy Podcast
The Experience Strategy Podcast | Part three of a four-part mini-series unpacking the frameworks in Dave Norton's new book, Human Context: How Intelligent Companies Build Customers. Most companies build their entire models around habits and routines. But the number one behavior people exhibit today isn't a habit or a routine — it's mode acquisition. People move fluidly between modes all day, they're fluent in the language of them ("I'm in writing mode, don't talk to me"), and they expect the companies they interact with to understand where they are. Most companies don't. This episode...
info_outline
Situational Markets — The Framework That Replaces Traditional Market Strategy
The Experience Strategy Podcast
The Experience Strategy Podcast | Part two of a four-part mini-series unpacking the frameworks in Dave Norton's new book, Human Context: How Intelligent Companies Build Customers. Every time you segment your target audience by who they are, you limit the number of people who could buy from you. That's the uncomfortable truth at the center of this episode — and the reason situational markets may be the most practically disruptive framework in Human Context. Dave and Joe trace the idea from Joe's original "markets within" concept through to how AI is already forcing companies to make this...
info_outline
Stupid, Dumb, Smart, Genius — The Framework That Tells You When and How to Use AI
The Experience Strategy Podcast
The Experience Strategy Podcast | Part one of a four-part mini-series unpacking the frameworks in Dave Norton's new book, Human Context: How Intelligent Companies Build Customers. The Stupid/Dumb/Smart/Genius framework has been in use with clients for nearly a decade. It was born in a room in Burbank, in real time, when Joe Pine found himself in the back of a client workshop and Dave told the client that Joe would have a new framework for them. This episode tells that origin story, walks through how the framework works — with examples from glasses to healthcare — and explains why...
info_outline
Dave Norton's New Book Is Out — Human Context and the Paradigm Shift Every Company Needs to Make
The Experience Strategy Podcast
The Experience Strategy Podcast | It's a book launch episode. Human Context: How Intelligent Companies Build Customers — Dave Norton's new book — released yesterday on Amazon. Joe and Aransas have read the galley. This episode covers the why now, the four frameworks at the book's core, and how companies are meant to actually use it. What's in This Episode Why Dave felt compelled to write this now. It goes back to 2015 and Digital Context 2.0, his first book, in which he argued that context would be the organizing logic that brought channels, tools, and technologies together in service...
info_outline
Healthcare Is Coming Back — And It's Getting More Human
The Experience Strategy Podcast
The Experience Strategy Podcast | A nurse whose only job was to hold a patient's hand during a procedure. A debrief with the doctor scheduled before the procedure was even booked. A title accidentally revealed mid-conversation. This episode covers a lot of ground — starting with where healthcare experience strategy stands right now, and ending somewhere that a certain author probably wasn't expecting. What's in This Episode Healthcare is recovering — and the investment is back. After a brutal five-year stretch that left providers burned out and hospital systems in survival mode, Dave...
info_outline
Personalized Pricing Is Coming — Should You Be Worried?
The Experience Strategy Podcast
The Experience Strategy Podcast | A Wall Street Journal article from June 3, 2026 asked a question that stopped the hosts cold: What is personalized pricing, and why are lawmakers scrambling to ban it? The premise — that companies might start using behavioral data to charge you a price uniquely calibrated to what you'll pay — prompted an immediate, live Google search and a conversation that spanned economics, loyalty, Kmart's demise, Coca-Cola's famous blunder, and a grocery delivery mishap that somehow became a love story. What's in This Episode Dynamic pricing versus personalized...
info_outline
The $900 Billion Wellness Tourism Trade — and What Luxury Hotels Are Really Selling Now
The Experience Strategy Podcast
Featured article: "" — Forbes A Forbes feature highlighting 12 luxury hotels leading the wellness tourism shift — immersive White Lotus–style programming, longevity-driven design, destination spa experiences — opens the door to one of the most consequential conversations on the show this year. Wellness tourism is on track to hit nearly $900 billion by 2030. The architecture is gorgeous. The marketing is aspirational. But the strategic story underneath is bigger than any single hotel. Joe, Dave, and Aransas use the article as a launch point to talk about what luxury actually means now,...
info_outline
The Death of Personas — and What Actually Replaces Them
The Experience Strategy Podcast
The Experience Strategy Podcast Hosts: Aransas Savas, Dave Norton, Joe Pine Featured articles: "" — SwiftERM "." — Audrey Chee-Read, Principal Analyst, Forrester Every other post on LinkedIn is announcing the death of something. Most of it is alarmist storytelling dressed up as insight. But under the noise, two recent articles — one from SwiftERM, one from Forrester — are pointing at a real problem: personas and segmentation, built for an earlier era of marketing, have become a drag on personalization in the era of AI. Dave, Joe, and Aransas trace where personas actually came from,...
info_outline
Microshifting, Modes, and the Life Systems Companies Still Refuse to See
The Experience Strategy Podcast
Featured article: "." by Eve Upton-Clark, Fast Company, October 7, 2025 Owl Labs reports that 65% of workers are interested in microshifting — what the company calls structured flexibility built from short, nonlinear work blocks matched to energy, duties, and productivity. Joe, Dave, and Aransas take the article apart and put it back together in a more useful frame. The term itself gets challenged early. Joe argues most of what the article describes is closer to macroshifting (hour-long, hour-and-a-half-long focused blocks), not micro. Dave reframes the word entirely: a shift is not a...
info_outline
‘Subway Takes’ and the Future of YouTube TV
The Experience Strategy Podcast
Kareem Rahma built Subway Takes into a hit with 2 million Instagram followers, a metro card as a microphone, and a format that runs in seconds. Now he’s walking away from a CNN deal to put his next show Keep the Meter Running on YouTube — because YouTube, in his words, is where the next Bourdain and the next Lena Dunham will come from. In this episode, Joe, Dave, and Aransas dig into what Rahma’s bet actually means for experience strategy. The conversation moves from short-form content design, to the death of “Gen Z YouTube” as a useful category, to why every brand needs to rethink...
info_outlineThe Experience Strategy Podcast | theexperiencestrategist.substack.com
Part three of a four-part mini-series unpacking the frameworks in Dave Norton's new book, Human Context: How Intelligent Companies Build Customers.
Most companies build their entire models around habits and routines. But the number one behavior people exhibit today isn't a habit or a routine — it's mode acquisition. People move fluidly between modes all day, they're fluent in the language of them ("I'm in writing mode, don't talk to me"), and they expect the companies they interact with to understand where they are. Most companies don't. This episode explains what modes are, how they connect to situational markets, and why knowing someone's mode tells you more about how to serve them than any demographic ever could.
What's in This Episode
The definition that matters most — and it's one word. A mode is a mindset and a set of behaviors that a person gets into temporarily. That last word is what separates modes from habits (permanent patterns) and routines (permanent structures). Right now, the three hosts are in podcast mode. When they hit stop, they won't be. Joe takes a different tone between episodes. Aransas's voice changes. Dave gets Joe's "I'm in writing mode" texts. People are already living this way — the framework just names what's happening.
The ballpark and the batter. To connect modes back to the last episode: if situational markets are the ballpark — the bounded context, the market you're going after — then modes are the batter. The same situation can contain many different modes. Two people can both be in the situation of choosing a college for their daughter. One is in full mommy mode — relational, emotionally loaded, cross-domain in its implications (financial, personal, professional, aspirational). Another is an adult returning to education for themselves, in a more self-directed, pragmatic mode. Same situational market. Completely different mode. Completely different support needed. Joe's extension makes it even richer: everyone on the field is in a different mode at every moment. The batter stepping up with a runner on third is in a different mode than when he's in the dugout. And if you know someone's in dugout mode — Dave's point is clear — sunflower seeds are your product.
Modes cross demographics. That's the whole point. Aransas in mommy mode could be any age, any income, any geography. The mode — not the demographic — tells you what she needs. Joe names the full stack of jobs that mode carries with it: functional, emotional, social, and aspirational. Know the mode, and you know the context. Know the context, and you can personalize in a way that demographic data never allows.
How modes, situations, and jobs connect. The three frameworks work together as a system. Jobs to be done describes what the customer needs broadly — the functional, emotional, social, and aspirational outcomes they're hiring for. Situational markets describe the bounded context: the when-statement, the market that's been identified and sized. Modes describe how — the specific mindset, energy, and intention the person brings to that moment. Dave's summary: situation tells you the market, mode tells you how they're experiencing their time within it. Know all three, and you have context that's genuinely actionable.
Why modes replace personas — and why that matters. Personas imply a static, monolithic person. Modes are the opposite: dynamic, contextual, temporary. A person is not their persona. They are whoever they are in this moment, in this situation, in this mode. That concept changes what you build, what you say, and how you show up. The mode map in Human Context gives companies a practical tool: map your specific situations to the modes customers are likely to enter, and build for those combinations rather than for a type of person.
Most companies are leaving this on the table. Dave has been developing the modes framework for over a decade. He remains genuinely surprised that more companies don't use it — especially now, when the language of modes is so embedded in how people describe themselves. The person who texts "I'm in writing mode" is handing you a direct signal about their context. Most companies have no system for receiving it.
Get the Book
Human Context: How Intelligent Companies Build Customers by Dave Norton is available now on Amazon (Kindle and print) and on Dave's Substack. The book includes a mode map framework and industry-specific workbooks showing how to apply modes, situational markets, and the other frameworks to your category.
Find the hosts by name or as The Experience Strategist at theexperiencestrategist.substack.com.