It limits our business and alienates our audience: Why to drop the term “consumer” and what to use instead
“Consumer.” We see it all the time in business strategy, but the truth is, “consumer” only applies to commodities. The word misses the point for most companies in two major ways. First, it’s company-centric. It implies that consumers will consume what the company creates; people will use up an offering and, ideally, consume it again. Here’s an example of how limiting the term is: In the greeting card industry, people don’t consume greeting cards, they give them. They are givers. If strategists at a card company talked about their customers as “givers,” a rich array of givers’ attributes would come to mind; they’d explore what it means to give and how the company can support the experience of giving. By contrast, sticking with the word “consumer” keeps the focus narrowly on the attributes of the cards to be consumed.
Marketers also lean into the word “consumer,” but they really work with audiences, a large chunk of which are actively trying not to act like audiences! They want to avoid marketing messages as they engage with media. That’s why great marketers think about the stories their audiences engage with, and tailor their messaging to make it time well spent—instead of the audience feeling like it’s simply detracting from their media engagement. Marketing benefits from using other terms for potential customers outside of mass media as well.
That brings me to the second limiting aspect of the word “consumer.” It addresses basic functional jobs to be done (“jobs to be done” are needs that people are willing to pay to satisfy). Basic goods like food, beverages, utilities, and materials satisfy the functional jobs of solving for hunger, thirst, warmth, and shelter. But even these basic goods often deliver on emotional, social, and aspirational needs. Nutritious foods help me become a healthy person, a Coke conjures positive emotions (think: “a Coke and a smile,” “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” and so on), the warmth of a home provides emotional comfort, and materials are used to create goods and services that answer a breadth of needs.
A key issue is that the more the term “consumer” is used, the more the people it represents become one-dimensional in the company mindset. Employees start out eager to play a positive role in people’s wonderfully varied lives, but over time this richness is lost as company conversations revolve around how to grow sales with consumers (an entity that uses their products). There are many powerful ways to create empathy and understanding of the roles that companies can play in people’s lives. Eliminating the word “consumer” is one of them.
So, what terms do capture the range of jobs to be done? In their seminal book, The Experience Economy, Joe Pine and James Gilmore provide a useful taxonomy. Commodities have “markets,” goods have “users,” services have “clients,” experiences have “guests,” and transformations have “aspirants.” These terms, in turn, help us better understand the role a company plays in supporting and attracting customers. A company is a “trader” in a market, a “manufacturer” (or “seller”) of goods, a “provider” of services, a “stager” of experiences, and a “guider” (or, for Joe and James, an “elicitor”) of transformations.
The takeaway: We should choose words that best reflect a person’s role as a user of our offerings. Leveraging the terms from The Experience Economy is one way to go; creating unique ones like “giver” for greeting cards is another. Being more intentional in word choice lets us sidestep the traps that arise from using the company-centric, functional job-focused term “consumer.”
Adapted from The Experience Economy by Joe Pine and James Gilmore:
