If you’ve ever met a shopper marketer, you will have been privy to a rant about how no one understands the true definition of a ‘consumer’. As entertaining as this rant is, I’m here to put shopper marketers out of their misery so everyone can play in the same sandpit and build better sandcastles.

Having worked across both service and product marketing myself, there’s a lot both disciplines can learn from each other. So let’s start by demystifying the jargon.

This is where the confusion starts. The word ‘consumer’ often gets bandied about as a catch-all terms to describe a bunch of people, when no one knows what else to call them. To add to the confusion, both product and service based marketers use this term. But they use it differently…

In service industries, the term ‘consumer’ is generally used to define individuals from the business segment. In this context, consumers describe the market as a whole. All the people in the market – your customers and potential customers. Technically, by this definition, consumers may also be shoppers or buyers. You see how this is could get confusing…

In the shopper marketing world, the term ‘consumer’ is used specifically to describe the person, or people, who actually consume your product. i.e. the person who eats or uses the product. The consumer may influence the purchase, but may not actually be the person making the purchase. Which brings us to shoppers and buyers.

In shopper marketing land your focus is on getting people in store and buying your product. It’s all about ‘at shelf’ so you may not care so much about what people think and feel about your brand. Here, the term ‘shopper’ is used to describe the behaviour and decision making process during the shopping mission. Shopper are people who go in store or visit your website if you’re an online retailer. They may purchase something or they may not.

Buyers are used by Byron Sharp nearly exclusively in ‘How Brands Grow’, so I thought it was worth a mention. Buyers represent the end game. People who actually purchase your product, and keep the finance team off your back. Buyers are always shoppers. But shoppers are not always buyers.

The term ‘customer’ is really only used in categories where the purchase price of the product or service is high, and the relationship is long and ongoing. In B2B, customers may also be known as clients. A customer in shopper terminology would be a consumer, and may also be a buyer.

In service terms, buyers are nearly always also customers, however, on rare occasions the person buying the service may be different to the person using the service. e.g. A man pays for his aging mother’s health care. In this case the customer or member is the mother. She is also the consumer of the product. Her details will be the ones on file. And she will be the person the health fund contacts with updates. The man is the buyer. The mother may influence the purchase, but as the buyer the son ultimately makes the decision.

Why should you care about all this mumbo jumbo. Despite their differences, service marketers can learn a lot from shopper markets and vise versa.
It’s no secret that there are benefits to understanding the differences between the people who buy your brand, the people who use your brand, and the people who influence the purchase decision. A popular case study where shopper insights were applied to turn sales around is Old Spice. A campaign based on the insight that women were responsible for more than 50% of men’s body wash purchases, that led to a sales increase of 125% year on year.

If you’re still confused, stay tuned for our next installment.