This is an important distinction for brands to make:

No more Consumers.

Customers.

Every time you refer to your ‘paying audience’ as Consumers, subtract one point from your brand’s Adaptability Index (AI). Every time you refer to them as Customers, add one point.

Here’s why:

Consuming stuff is so last century. The piggery and gluttony that came with relating material goods and conspicuous services to one’s status is totally unsustainable. It is a zero sum game.

Customizing stuff (and oneself), on the other hand, the honoring of customs and customers, is the engine that drives the sustainable economy. It is a generative process designed to conserve and make more efficient use of increasingly scarce resources.

Consumers consume. Customers customize. That’s it in a nutshell.

Here are some of the implications:

Brands who emphasize consumption contribute to obesity, both mental and physical. They represent an ever-larger drain on the planet’s resources. They introduce a lot of useless crap onto the world by manufacturing illusory needs. They associate levels of consumption with status. The biggest of this. The most of that. The hardest. The shiniest.  The latest and greatest. These brands pay for the audience’s attention. Most significantly, they define the relationship between the brand and the audience using numbers.

I, Consumer, am a number of numbers. This is my number of average waking hours per day. A percentage of those waking hours belongs to you, a brand. During the percentage that belongs to you, I consume a percentage of the yearly sales of your product in my demographic. You spend a number to hold my attention. If that number stays below a certain acquisition price relative to the yearly value of the percentage of my day that I devote to you, you will keep spending it. If it gets too high, you will let my attention drift elsewhere. A computer program will tell you what to and then cover your tracks so that you’ll be blameless.  No one will be able to lay a hot dog on you.

Brands who customize largely participate in customs that already exist, customs into which they’ve been invited by a customer.  (The attempt to manufacture a custom is costly, with very low ROI.)  The relationship between a brand and a customer is a conversation, a dialogue. These brands serve causes that cannot be defined by numbers (even as numerical values for what they contribute and receive as a result of their participation, can and must be assigned and evaluated continuously). Brands with customers understand that consumption of the brand’s product or service represents part of, but not the entirety of, their value to the customer.  Consumption is one an element of a narrative that has many elements, most of which are outside the brand’s control. These brands prefer earning attention from their audience to paying for it.

I, Customer, am an individual. One of a kind. All my friends are one of a kind. I got my thing, you know, just like you got yours, just like everybody’s got their own. I am basically awake 24 hours a day, because I got plates in the air, you know. My homies in Bulgaria are coding some tracks we’re going to run off a honeypot server for which we are getting paid by a new label in Atlanta call Tso-Tso that does B-Boy tracks for mall shows and competitions all over the Southern U.S., Australia and the Philippines. Shit is off the hook. We get a dollar per download, and already this month we’ve made five thousand dollars. First thing in the morning, I am catching a plane to Fort Meyers to work with some friends down there who have a band and play clubs at night, and weatherize houses during the day for twenty bucks an hour. I’m producing their next album and they are paying me by getting me a job weatherizing houses for the summer. And on the weekends we take out one guy’s girlfriend’s family’s boat and party like animals. Any brand that’s down for this scene is welcome to roll with me.

In a sustainable economy, how we roll is going to be much more important than how much we roll.  It used to be about the size your boat.  Now it’s about boating like only you (and your crazy friends) know how.