The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

How do you call your ‘customers’? --- A tribute to Abraham Maslow

It is interesting to observe how ‘customers’ are called in different areas of business. I envision a five-level pyramid with a decreasing importance from top to bottom (from a supplier point of view). Here’s a rough outline of how I see it.

At the top of the pyramid, customers have reached the supreme status of ‘partner’. They are integrated into the supplier’s business and commercial transactions are the result of close collaboration throughout the supply chain. Partners receive utmost consideration and get the best in service and support.

At the next level you have ‘clients’ defined by Webster as persons or companies for whom a lawyer, accountant, advertising agency, etc. is acting . Superficially it looks like a posh way to name a customer with whom you try to establish a relationship. In fact, it implies a mutual understanding on a one-to-one basis. The supplier understands the specific needs of his/her client and the client expects specific treatment. Note that they are called ‘patients’ in the medical field, probably an appropriate name in regard to the length of the queues in most practices **.

Then you have plain vanilla ‘customers’ defined by Webster as persons who buy from an establishment regularly. Here the relationship is rather mono-directional. For a supermarket, customers are statistical entities that can be analysed on a personal basis when they regularly use the same credit card. Yet companies like Amazon remember your name and your shopping habits, like your local butcher. So, the difference between a ‘client’ and a ‘customer’ can be rather fuzzy, except for the fact that a client and her/his supplier are almost always bound by a contract.

Also bound by a contract with a supplier, you find ‘subscribers’ who are significantly more anonymous in the sense that suppliers rarely try to understand their specific needs. Yet many self-centred suppliers won’t hesitate to lambaste late payers and to inundate captive subscribers with junk mail and meaningless offers that are just wasting their money in pretentious extravaganzas.

Finally, at the bottom of the stack, lives the ‘consumer’, the elusive punter, patron, buyer and shopper who has the money all suppliers try to catch. He/she is the silhouette that marketers, statisticians and other anthropologists try to refine through computer analysis, surveys, focus groups and so on.

Astute readers will have noticed that this pyramid is not homogeneous. The top is mainly about B2B (business-to-business) customers and the bottom about B2C (business-to-consumer). But I thought this simple taxonomy could be interesting. What do you think?

** NOTE ** Aren’t you worried that a doctor’s office is called a ‘practice’.