In marketing and comms, we are constantly trying to move away from the abstraction of 'customers' and 'consumers', and think in terms of real people. We give these archetypal (usually stereotypical!) consumers a name, we write pen portraits of their lives, we make everything very specific and concrete.
Which does make intuitive sense - consumers are people too after all...it's you and I, and we're not robots or theoretical constructs.
But then this thought provoker from Faris Yakob gave me pause for thought...
"Customers are to people as waves are to water"
Which he went on to unpack thus...
"For the majority of marketing, it may be better not to think of customers as people. ‘Customers’ are a repeating pattern of behaviour that expresses itself in people – from the point of view of a company, it doesn’t really matter who that person is when they walk into a store. Throughout the marketing process, we spend a lot of time trying to understand the kind of people who are most likely to buy, but behavioural economics and decision research all suggest that 'where', 'what' and 'when' are at least as important as 'who'."
A cousin to the content vs context debate in media (is it what you do or where you do it that matters most), the question of whether the 'who' of the people buying our products and services is maybe less all encompassingly important than marketing good practice suggests is a challenging one.
In developing creative ideas, having a bulls-eye still feels important, but maybe that bulls-eye is a behaviour not a demographic.
Which does make a different kind of intuitive sense to me, particularly if a look back at this, where in writing I have obviously seen the who as less important than the what.
