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“Customers”: Is it the right word?

Posted on
June 6, 2008

In the 2 years since I left LEGO, I’ve had to retrain myself to referring to people who buy stuff from companies as “consumers”. LEGO, like many manufacturing companies, has both customers (Wal-Mart, Target, Toys R’ Us, etc.) and consumers (mom, 7 year old boys, Jake). It all makes sense, but removed from that environment, the use of the word “consumer” just seems slimy.

I’ve been trying desperately to retrain my brain to stop using “consumer” and instead use “customer”. But it dawned on me today - maybe I’m using the wrong word. Right or wrong, customer implies a transaction. Sure you may have an ongoing series of transactions contained by some level of relationship. But ultimately, we’re still focusing on the transaction.

But about the word “client”? Clients are inherently based on a longer-term relationship, and are steeped in a relationship that builds towards a success of some sort. Whether you’re talking about lawyers, strategists, or hairdressers, the goal is to have the service provider learn so much about their client that it’s a highly communicative, ongoing interaction.

Imagine if Best Buy thought of me as a client rather than a customer.


Building Community, Business/Marketing
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Viewing 3 Comments

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    Consumer to customer to client - an interesting progression. I'm leery of the cheesy term syndrome - like Disney's "cast member" instead of "employee" - but this one actually has meaning.

    Consumers use your stuff, customers buy your stuff... clients are the ones you have a relationship with. An overused word, but a really important one.

    As an agency kid, I'm used to dealing with my clients, but I wonder what would change if I start thinking of more people that way.

    Thanks for the food for thought!
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    I like your thinking. Let me follow your logic a little more. Companies, brands, etc are all service providers. They provide a service or a product that provides a service, but either way serving a base of individuals who use their service is at the core of what they do. As service providers it would then follow that all individuals who are using a service be considered clients of the service provider.

    Eg. Coke provides a refreshment service, and I, as a client of Coke, use said service to feel refreshed. How does Coke know if there service is living up to my expectations? They should be engaging with me as a client, and allowing me, their client, the ability to communicate openly about the nature of the relationship and the service, either good or bad. If my experiences are bad, they should be treating me like a client and trying to repair the relationship and their reputation as a service provider.
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    Difficult one, that. It taps directly into the consumer-producer convergence happening as the web enables more people to "produce" and warrant transactions for what they do. I agree "customers" and "consumers" are equally bad, and I dislike "prosumer" even more... Not sure about clients though, as it doesn't quite capture the power of the new converged consumer-producer. Charlene Li persistently calls this group for "users" in her book "Groundswell", as this implies their newfound capability of using something, rather than just passively receiving a message or a product. But this doesn't seem quite right yet.

    At kaplak, we call our users/customers for "skippers", btw, as we emphasize web users' capabilities to "transport a message or product" online. I guess we'll stick with that until something more appropriate comes up.

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