The Dirtiest Word in Business? Consumers.
We are all guilty of using jargon. We do it out of insecurity, hoping that a certain term will make us appear more knowledgeable; out of ignorance, because we don’t know enough about the subject to speak more plainly; and, of course, out of habit or laziness.
It’s easy not to care. As long as we understand each other, the argument goes, why complain if every change is now a pivot, facts are lauded as insights, and basic computing functions are hyped as machine learning? Who wants to censure someone for some light obfuscation when there are more pressing issues to attend to.
But it’s time we called each other out on one of the most pernicious words in the annals of argot — consumers.
This is a piece of jargon so pervasive that I’d venture it’s used more often in a business context than the words it stands in for: people, individuals, humans. If you work in marketing or a related field (and they’re pretty much all related now), you probably say consumers several times times a day without thinking about it, not noticing that it’s a characterization of those with whom you share the planet as bipedal purses whose only value is as buyers of stuff.
I am hardly the first to come to this conclusion. The oft-repeated adage from legendary adman David Ogilvy: “The customer is not a moron, she’s your wife,” was driving at the danger of ignoring the humanity of the people you are thinking about or communicating with.
Many others have built on Ogilvy’s thought. Flipping the emphasis to show the marketing world the benefit of seeing your fellow human as more than a walking wallet, Wieden & Kennedy’s Martin Weigel said in his 2010 Planner’s Manifesto: “Seeing people rather than consumers encourages us to see their broader lives beyond fleeting interactions with our brand. In many ways the ‘consumer’ is a figment of the marketing imagination.”
Scientists have even shown that using the term can make us behave anti-socially. In 2012, a research team at Northwestern published a study in Psychological Science, which showed that when we think of each other as consumers we are more depressed and act more anxiously and selfishly than if we think of each other as individuals. (Here’s Newsweek’s report on the study.)
Using a term like consumers to reduce people to having a single function in society, also seems to be having an odd, maybe dangerous, effect on the analysis of important economic events such as the purchase of a huge company by an inconceivably huge company.
Here’s the New York Times on Amazon acquiring Whole Foods in June 2017: “Heated competition among retailers could be a win for consumers who will be able to pick up their organic sugar beets from Canada, fresh turbot from the North Atlantic and papayas from Guatemala at ever-cheaper prices.”
Turbot prices can really get you down, so it sounds like this deal is a winner. At least until we consider that the promise of price cuts is usually based on the idea that a merger creates duplication of functions so that some people can be laid off. So, yes consumers should welcome the merger, just as long as they are not the consumers losing their jobs.
This dichotomy was writ large in a recent US News report that asked whether mergers are good for us. Professor Michael Noel of Texas Tech opened the bidding: “They’re good for consumers,” because they “drive operating efficiencies and reduce redundancies in staffing.” A paragraph later another expert, Joshua Stager, said mergers hurt people in the labor market, due to job cuts and reduced long-term competition between employers depressing pay and benefits.
It is not unusual to see these two sentiments juxtaposed. Some version of the phrase, “good news for consumers, bad news for employees,” appears frequently in reports on mega-mergers. None that I have seen noted these are not mutually exclusive groups of people.
Thinking of people as consumers allows us to falsely compartmentalize the impact of such events. As Stager stated in that US News piece, antitrust law focuses on “the impact on consumers but not on the labor market.” So despite the fact the labor market and consumers are one and the same group of humans, we decide whether to allow these mergers on the basis of how they might affect the cost of goods people are going to consume, yet fail to look at how they affect those same people’s ability to earn.
The most obvious justification for evaluating a merger this way, is that the employees are usually a small subset of the ‘consumers’ in question. A few thousand lose their jobs, but millions get access to cheaper papayas, cellphone service, or airplane rides.
But the flaw in emphasizing the ‘consumer’ and ignoring the ‘labor,’ starts to show itself if we consider that these mergers are not one-off events. Since 2007 they’ve happened with increasing frequency, concentrating power in almost every category. The Council of Economic Advisers found that between 1997 and 2012 the share of dollars going to the top companies grew in 12 of 13 categories.
Mergers don’t just affect people in the merged entities either. Job cuts and downward wage pressure often follow at a merged company’s rivals, as they try to match the new entity’s buoyed revenue or reduced prices. There may also be job cuts and wage pressure throughout the supply chain, as vendors are selling to fewer, bigger entities, with increased leverage to drive down suppliers’ prices. Many economists think these mergers — and the swallow-all companies they create — are a primary reason for wage stagnation in the middle and working class.
What if we recognized that the people in the company selling the stuff and the people outside the company buying the stuff are all just people with the same wants and needs? Surely then we’d think harder about allowing mergers that eliminate jobs and suppress wages, because they’re not just happening to a specific group of employees, they’re happening to us.
That same recognition that the humans in our companies are just like the humans outside them would make us better marketers too. The marketing dreck that surrounds us is often the result of a group of people in a company creating an abstraction of a group of people outside the company, namely the ‘consumers,’ often based on selectively culled data. They convince themselves based on their abstraction that this group of people is going to appreciate a certain piece of marketing they want to target at them. Yet the truth is that if the in-company group asked themselves if they’d want to experience that same marketing, they’d frequently admit they would not — I’ve witnessed this happen on several occasions, and spoken to others who have too.
Martin Wiegel is right that thinking of your buyer as a person rather than a consumer helps you see them in a broader way and to identify behaviors and emotions that might enable you to make a better connection with that person. Perhaps even more fundamentally, seeing them as a person rather than a purse might be a handy reminder that we have humanity in common. That means that if what we’re doing isn’t good for them, it isn’t good for us either.
