We use words like customer, user, buyer, and influencer to describe the people a company serves, but those labels aren’t really about the people. They are about the role that person plays in their relationship with us.
The role may matter most to you, but it’s a tiny fraction of who they are as a person. If walked up to 10 people on the street and said “Tell me about yourself,” I doubt anyone would lead with “I’m an Amazon customer.”
Work related roles like teacher, manager, marketer, or engineer may come up first, especially in the US. Personal roles like parent, spouse, child, and friend are popular, too, as are interest-based identities like “athlete” or “bookworm.”
The same individual may have multiple roles in relationship to your company. Employees can be customers. Buyers can be users. One B2B client shared that, in his business, some customers are also competitors. At the end of the day, though, all those experiences happen inside the same brain.
This got me thinking…if we looked at experiences through the lens of whichever role the customer mentions first when asked “Tell me about yourself” would we make different decisions?
