There are consumers, customers and then there are people…

Jonathan MacDonald (my business partner in this fluid world) and I received an interesting piece of feedback from a client just before Xmas.

“In your report you sometimes refer to customers as people, and sometimes as consumers, if you don’t mind can we always call them customers for consistency”.

Well, and in this instance I feel particularly confident speaking for Jonathan, we do mind.

Exchanging customers for consumers, consumers for people, or customers for people is not a question of looking up different words in the thesaurus to avoid repeating oneself in a report, it’s a very conscious decision.

What I’m about to say will be hard for some people in advertising to understand…

…but the truth is that when you wake up in the morning, before you quickly reach for your phone dying to read a marketing text message, or an e-mail from someone wanting you to buy something based on a previous purchase, before you reach for the cereal box you bought only because you saw the ad, before you drink your espresso (inspired by Mr Clooney), and before rushing out for your daily fix of billions of advertising messages on which you will immediately act…

…before all that, and for considerable chunks of the remainder of the day, you will be… we will all be, just that people. Customers and consumers is what we are in-between being people.

We are people when we go about our everyday lives (human centric view).
We are customers when we buy (retail centric view).
And we are consumers when we consume, or use something (marketing centric view).

I think you will agree that they are simply not the same thing. Any marketer who does not undersand this distinction will do so at his peril.

You will not see the same advertising in the retail environment for Lynx (Axe to my European friends) as you see on TV, why? Simple, the people responsible for the brand understand that the consumer is a 16-year-old boy, but that the customer is his mother.

Amazon should not try to sell me a digital camera when they know I’ve just bought one, as I’m unlikely to be a customer of something I’m in the middle of consuming – and still they keep trying. (I know Amazon is my pet peeve at the moment).

So by the same rational, traditional style advertising should not be aimed at people when they are being people. This does not mean that at that moment we can’t be inspired to become a customer or consumer, it just means we are unlikely to be inspired to make that shift because someone ‘talks’ at us and interrupts our everyday lives (we are busy…being people – remember).

Consumer insights and customer research (yes the words mean something) have their place, but it should fall under a much broader banner, the one of understanding people. This not seen from the perspective of what they read, or what they buy, or use, but simply by understanding how they live their lives and the psychology behind their feelings and the drivers of their choices.

Simples, as Mr Aleksandr Orlov (from meerkat.com) would say…not so much I say, if we are still asked to change the words in the name of consistency.

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