Let’s kill ‘the Consumer’
If you refer to the people who buy your product or service as ‘the consumer’, you should probably stop. Here’s why…
The word ‘Consumer’ might seem inextricably ingrained in the vernacular of the marketing industry, but it’s time we reevaluated our relationship with audiences and defined people not simply by what they consume from our brand, but what they contribute to it.
The proverbial mouth to feed
The truth is, language is lazy. Too often, it’s allowed to go stale without replacement. And this is especially true of field-specific-language. Jargon. As is the case with the pervasive use of ‘consumer’ in marketing industries. ‘Consumer’ is an economic term that pre-dates contemporary brand thinking. It came before we recognised the power of peer-to-peer recommendation. Before social media. Before the internet even. It is a term coined by economists to help define transactions, and it boils each and every one of us down to the transactions we make, rather than the actions we take. For the brands using it, we become the simple mouth to feed. The body to clothe. The proverbial bum on the seat and nothing more.
‘Birth-givers’ or ‘Mothers’?
It’s this lack of respect, more than the glaring inaccuracy and over-simplification of a customer’s behaviour, that irks me most. The term ‘consumer’ patronises your audience. Dehumanises them even. Just as language dates, it controls so much more than we realise. Indeed, calling your audience ‘consumers’ may not just be a reflection of your lack of respect for them, it could even be the tacit genesis of it.
We don’t call mothers ‘birth-givers’. That’s because their relationship with us is so much more than the transaction that biologically defines their status. To ‘mother’ is to do a spectrum of things within a lasting and multi-dimensional, evolving relationship (for most people). To consume is simply to swallow. Ingest. Take. Buy.
Like it or not, your audiences do so much more than consume. They don’t just exist, they live.
But beyond this toxic combination of inaccuracy and dehumanisation, the terminology is fused to an outmoded stack-it-high-sell-it-cheap, volume-based market that has ‘more consumption’ as its true north, over the delivery of more value to people’s lives.
The post-consumer era
As we embark on a period of marketing where we need to redefine the idea of growth to accommodate the planet’s needs as well as the people who live on it, ‘consumers’ have already become so much more than the name suggests. Advocates, activists, even equity investors, your relationship with your audiences as a brand is so much richer than the bite they take from it. And your responsibility to the world is not to make certain consumption aspirational, but certain actions inspirational.
Some may call this an idealistic view. So for the ‘we sell shit, get over it’ crowd of marketers, let me clear one thing up: you don’t ‘sell shit’. They buy it. Behave accordingly.
What, how, why, when and where people buy is changing faster than ever before… so standing stock still with your head in the trough will only result in your marketing becoming increasingly ineffective and irrelevant.
Making the change
If we were to look at our audiences through a more human lens, one that sees all of them, and not just the moment they open their wallet, we might not only connect with them better — we might care about them more. Caring about your audience might not seem essential to ruthless business people, but this is my call: if there’s one group of people that are going to struggle in the next century, it’s the folks who rank ruthlessness above compassion.
It might seem like a small thing, but changing our language around consumption will help the brands we own move from a realm of shallow success to one of deep significance. It can raise our sights from simply competing in an industry, to redefining it.
So there you have it — why I avoid the word ‘consumer’. But also why I think we should drop the word from our collective marketing vocabulary. Instead, let’s talk about the people who make or break our brands with a little more respect. Audiences. Customers even. But not ‘consumers’.
