The ConsumerUser

It's time to revisit Aaron Shapiro's book "User Not Consumer' and its impact on marketing today.  The CEO of HUGE (the agency) was far before his time with its launch. But while an excellent read, a word has not caught on catchy enough for our marketing publication leads.

"User Not Consumer" came out almost two years ago and its importance has only increased as the parallels among brand experience, traditional to digital consumer user journey and digital UX all come full circle. With the confluence of these forces, its clear the new Consumer / User should thus be more officially recognized in our marketing vocabulary. We have the Prosumer; why not the Consumeruser? 

It's only when we marketing managers officially recognize the joining of the two words (consumer and user) into one word that effective planning will truly take form in digital and mobile. By not adopting the word, its possible brand consumer goals will continue to stay too far away from the user (creative technologists are you listening?). The true recognized driver of all marketing finally must be officially clear, recognized and labeled: the user. Yes, the consumer is always going to be the person who parts way with money to purchase a product, but that addresses only one of the four marketing P's (price). The fact is that the user is now functionally more impacted by the other three P's (place, product, promotion) - mostly due to mobile. Going forward in marketing as we drive into mobile-centric marketing strategy, we should no longer be talking about the consumer. We should be talking about the consumeruser.