Holiday 2025 Behavior Unpacked: How Google Proves Buyer Modalities Shape Email Marketing Decisions

By Kath Pay

Holiday 2025 is shaping up to be one of the most psychologically complex shopping seasons we’ve seen in years. Shoppers are cautious. Budgets are tight. Brand trust has never mattered more.

This is especially relevant for email marketers, where understanding buyer modalities can mean the difference between campaigns that feel generic and messages that truly resonate.

But, while the landscape looks more fragmented on the surface, Google’s new Holiday Essentials 2025 report reveals a striking truth beneath it:

People don’t just behave differently. They think differently. What’s more, their decision-making patterns map directly to the Four Buyer Modalities.

If you have followed my posts here, or heard me speak about behavioural science in email marketing, you’ll know I’m passionate about writing and designing email messages to accommodate the way people make decisions.

The Four Buyer Modalities, which I use based on research from sources as disparate as Hippocrates, Jakob Nielsen, Myers-Briggs, and marketing experts Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg, are the backbone of that approach. I classify shoppers (a term that includes email readers and digital website visitors) as

Competitive
Methodical
Spontaneous
Humanistic

Each category describes a set of characteristics marking the ways people interpret information, assess risk, and gain confidence in a purchase. Knowing these distinctions is important, especially if your customers don’t share your personal shopping style. You’ll be able to create strategically sound campaigns for your different shoppers while also overcoming your personal predilections.

Let’s say you’re a Spontaneous shopper, but most of your customers are Methodicals. If your strategy leads you to create campaigns that appeal mainly to other Spontaneous shoppers, that could explain why they aren’t landing with a Methodical audience.

Dig deeper: Design emails for 4 personality types to win back customers

4 takeaways for email marketers this holiday season

This holiday season, Google has handed us a data-backed gift: a full report evidencing that these modalities are real, and they influence nearly every holiday shopping journey.

Here are my four takeaways from Google’s latest research that will have the greatest impact on your strategic planning, now and into 2026. Grab a free copy of the report, and follow along with me.

1. Witness the rise of the deliberate shopper

Let’s start with the most compelling chart in the entire report — the “Deliberate Holiday Shopper” research graph (Page 5).

Here are the most relevant statistics:

51% of shoppers value spending more time to save money
63% prioritise getting the best deal over impulse buying
53% prefer planning ahead rather than buying “when it feels right”

In short, the majority of shoppers behave like Competitive or Methodical modalities. This alone is significant. But Google goes further.

50% conduct the same amount of pre-purchase research as the rest of the year
38% do even more
61% use 5+ touchpoints in their journey
And Google or YouTube, or both, appear in 86% of all shopper journeys

When you think about the impact, you’ll see this isn’t just about caution. It’s also about cognitive style.

Competitive and Methodical buyers thrive in environments where they can compare, validate, and confirm. Google’s findings simply show that the holiday season amplifies these tendencies. In other words, they’re still reading your fine print, even as the pressure grows to complete shopping on time.

2. Google’s new “value equation” maps to the modalities

Google defines today’s shopper priorities around three pillars (Pages 6–8):

Right price
Product confidence
Purchase convenience

Each of these pillars aligns with a Buyer Modality.

Right price = Competitive modality

Google reports that nearly half of shoppers will actively search for competitive prices and leverage major sales events. Thirty-two percent are buying only when a discount appears.

This is textbook Competitive behaviour: “I want to win the deal.”

Product confidence = Methodical + Humanistic

Methodical buyers crave detail, validation, reviews, and long-form content. Humanistic buyers crave trust, human reassurance, and social proof.

Google’s findings support both buyers.

Search is the #1 place shoppers go to confirm facts
70% of social media users validate their discoveries on Google
YouTube creators are now among the most trusted sources of product insight
80% say YouTube helps them make more confident purchase decisions

If I had created a behavioural study to define Methodical and Humanistic shopping patterns, it would look almost identical to this.

Purchase convenience = Spontaneous

Spontaneous buyers make fast, intuitive decisions, as long as you give them a smooth path to checkout. Google highlights these factors that Spontaneous shoppers need to say “yes” in the moment:

Fast delivery
Flexible returns
Seamless checkout
Personalised relevance
Local inventory visibility

3. Google’s AI ecosystem also reinforces the modalities

Google’s emphasis on AI-powered discovery, creative, and optimisation (Pages 14–17) supports different modalities automatically:

Competitive: Dynamic pricing signals, search annotations, deal surfaced directly in Shopping
Methodical: Detailed AI Overviews, multimodal search results, structured product data
Humanistic: Creator partnerships, authentic video content, review-led discovery
Spontaneous: One-click personalisation, fast-loading landing pages, frictionless paths

The subconscious brilliance of Google’s AI enhancements is that they cater to how shoppers think, and not just what they search for.

4. Marketers must optimize for cognitive fit, not just channel

The message from Google’s research is unmistakable: Shoppers don’t respond to one-size-fits-all messages. They respond to cognitive fit.

Marketers who design emails, pages, automations, and journeys to accommodate all Four Modalities simultaneously will outperform those who optimize purely for the email channel itself. That means copy must be on point, thoughtful, and comprehensive, without filling the page with paragraphs of tiny print. It’s a big job, but your copywriters should be ready for it.

I can hear what you’re thinking: “Kath, how can I put all of this into a single email? Do I have to create four campaigns?” Absolutely not! That would be crazy, right? And nobody has time for that now that the starting gun has gone off and the race has begun.

Instead, a simple design and a few well-chosen words can convey the meanings your customers look for. You can devote one campaign to Spontaneous shoppers with content that leads Methodical and Humanistic shoppers to click for more information. And that’s just one example.

Here are more ideas:

For Competitive buyers: Show value. Compare clearly. Anchor price. Prove the win.
For Methodical buyers: Provide depth. Structure information. Offer detail-rich content.
For Humanistic buyers: Use testimonials, creators, user-generated content, and relationship-led copy.
For Spontaneous buyers: Reduce friction. Speed up decisions. Remove barriers.

This isn’t personalisation, it’s persuasion. It’s grounded in behavioural science, not assumptions.

The Big Takeaway: The four buyer modalities aren’t just theory

For years, marketers have sensed these patterns intuitively. Now, Google’s global dataset confirms them empirically.

What we’re seeing isn’t “holiday behaviour.” It’s human behaviour amplified when the stakes are higher.

That’s why this framework is so powerful.

Whether you’re creating email journeys, landing pages, ads, or automations, the Four Buyer Modalities give you a blueprint for designing communications that work with the brain, not against it.

Conclusion: Psychology as a competitive advantage

Holiday 2025 might be more cautious and research-driven than in previous years, but beneath the surface lies an incredibly stable truth. People think differently, process differently, and decide differently.

Google’s new report simply shines a light on the patterns and helps you see what you might have overlooked in your past holiday campaigns and what could have given you results that didn’t match your goals or expectations.

When you embrace these modalities, especially in an AI-powered landscape, you can help your customers engage deeper and come to you first before they check out your competition. Acknowledging their differences can have these beneficial results

Build trust
Accelerate decisions
Reduce friction
Attract high-value customers
Create messaging that resonates with everyone, not just the loudest modality in the room or the one that aligns with your personal predilections.

That’s what “winning the season” really means.

Want to apply the Buyer Modalities framework to your own email campaigns?

Understanding the Four Buyer Modalities is powerful. Knowing how to apply them, consistently, ethically, and at scale, is where the real advantage lies.

Inside the Intermediate Buyer Modalities & GenAI course at the Holistic Email Academy, you’ll learn how to:

Apply the Buyer Modalities framework to real email and lifecycle scenarios
Use GenAI to support strategy, ideation, and execution (without losing human nuance)
Write and design emails that speak to all four modalities in a single message
Build campaigns that align with how people actually think and decide

If Google’s data has you rethinking your approach, this course shows you exactly how to put that thinking to work.

Explore the Buyer Modalities & GenAI course >>

Your customers’ brains haven’t changed. The tools you can use to meet them where they are have.