Today I want to take a look at the term “customer”. A customer is “one that purchases a commodity or service” as defined by Merriam-Webster. This is the traditional definition that most businesses use when they talk about customers. There is often a distinction between “consumers” and “customers” as well, especially in retail. Typically “customers” to them are their B2B distribution partners whereas “consumers” are the people who actually use their product. Some go even further breaking up “consumers” into “purchasers” and “consumers”, with “purchasers” being the ones that actually buy the product and “consumers” being the ones that consumed it. Think of a Mom who buys hot dogs for her kids. Mom is the “purchaser”, and the kids are the “consumers”.
Most of these terms are broken up like this for marketing purposes, to know who the business is actually selling to, and how the messaging needs to shift in order to apply to each relevant group. Selling to a late 30s mother requires a totally different message than selling to a group of under 12s, even if you’re selling them both on the same product. These different groups were likely developed with rich data and analytics that define specific demographic and psychographic data points related to them in order to produce a message, a product, a brand, etc. that will have the most likely chance to turn them into that traditional definition of customer, someone who purchases a commodity or service.
Most of you reading this probably already know all this and likely use these same terms or similar in your job today. Which is fine. The goal of these terms was to help differentiate and better adapt marketing messages and products for the right audience. That’s just smart business.
But there’s a problem with it.
See with all the data and analytics we have available to us nowadays (and it is a lot!), the people behind these terms get lost. That mom buying hot dogs for her kids may be health conscious and knows hot dogs aren’t the greatest choice but her busy schedule and the kids’ extracurriculars don’t give her many options in what she can quickly make for them. She’s stressed, she’s rushed, and she may even feel like she’s failing her children because of the healthy standards she wants to hold herself to but circumstances don’t leave her much choice. Going a step further it could even be that she tried other options but because of the marketing and branding out there for the hot dogs, her kids won’t eat anything else when they’re rushed. That could mean that while she is still a “customer”, purchasing those hot dogs for her kids, she could be resentful against the company that makes the hot dogs for their marketing and branding. Or maybe she’s upset because the company can make hot dogs cheap but any healthy quick options are more expensive and out of her budget range. Maybe she doesn’t even consider the company at all and just buys whatever hot dogs are on sale but still feels defeated and stressed with no relief coming.
Consider another scenario: a single male in his early 20s looking for renter’s insurance for the first time now that he’s moved out of his parent’s house. We might know he moved out because he got a new job downtown and wanted to be closer but we might not know he wanted to be closer because he was stressed out from being at his parent’s house because they were invasive into his private life. He wanted to be downtown because it was closer to the bars and clubs he liked to go to in hopes of meeting a partner. He got a job specifically downtown to allow him to explore this and find someone for a relationship where he doesn’t have his parents breathing down his neck. He rushed into a job he doesn’t like in order to get out quickly but doesn’t really know the first thing about living on his own because of how involved his parents were in his life at home. Insurance is a necessity for him to live on his own but it doesn’t alleviate the stressors he’s experiencing being out there on his own. It’s not helping him learn to cook, to make a budget, to pay bills, to deal with stress at work. It’s just a one-and-done thing, a necessary evil to get out of the way so he can enjoy his freedom. But he doesn’t even know how to be free.
All this is to say that there is so much more to “customers” than what the data says. Even with all the rich data that can be captured online nowadays, even with machine learning and AI parsing through all that information and making connections and insights far more detailed than ever seen before, we still don’t have a full picture of the lives of our customers. You might map out the entire customer journey to understand what their full purchasing and consumption experience looks like but you’re missing what else is going on outside of that journey, or in parallel to it.
A human life is painted by the multitude of emotions and experiences a person goes through and is layered together to create who they are and how they interact with the world. They are more than a customer. They are a person, just like you and me, with moments of joy and moments of stress, positive interactions, and negative ones, a mishmash of swirling thoughts ranging from which hot dogs to buy to which show to watch to which kid needs to be dropped off next and more. Focusing on the data and the analytics can help draw the outline of their life in a small snapshot of its entirety but without talking to them directly, without empathizing with them, without understanding those emotions and experiences and thoughts beyond the ones directly related to your product or service, you will fail to capture what it means to be them and fail to understand the real reasons behind the choices they make.
Pairing that rich data with actual interviews and conversations with customers is critical to understanding the true motivators and detractors behind their decision-making. This is why customer interviews, co-creation sessions, ad boards, and ethnographies are so important. They allow you to step into the customer’s shoes and see things from their perspective. They let you empathize with the struggles they go through, the challenges they face, and the hopes they have. It can show you that while your product or service might be something they are purchasing, there isn’t much thought into it because of all the other things going on in their lives. That lets you then question, how can you make their lives better? How can your product be improved? How can your services be refined or expanded? How can a shift in marketing brighten their day and make them think a little more about the purchases they make?
Remember, they are not just customers. They are humans.