There are many types of business models, and depending on which one a company uses, customers and users need to be handled differently. This matters most for how you interact and communicate with them.
We can define a customer as the person or organization that pays for a product or service, and a user as the person or organization that actually uses it. Sometimes the user pays the customer, for example when a product is sold through a partner. In that case the user can also be called the end customer.
One of the most important reasons to understand both customers and users is that they place different demands on how a company communicates its offer. We can divide it into a customer offer and a user offer.
Here are a few examples.
Customer and user are the same person
Take a watchmaker that sells directly to consumers. A private person is both customer and buyer, and the communication is fairly simple, since the customer offer and the user offer are the same. For less expensive watches the message is probably something like “design and price”, and for more expensive watches something like “status and craftsmanship”. If the watchmaker starts working through retailers or distributors, the communication with them will probably need to look different, which places new demands on the customer offer.
Customer and user are different
A social network is an example with more complexity. Its users are mainly private individuals, and the user offer is something like “easy and efficient communication”. Its customers, on the other hand, are companies that are offered efficient advertising to a tailored audience of users.
These are two very different offers, communicated to different groups. It is also the number of users, their satisfaction and how actively they use the service that make an attractive customer offer possible in the first place. The user base has to be built before the revenue can come, which requires capital and therefore financial staying power.
Customer and user are the same company
In a pure B2B (business-to-business) solution, such as a company that supplies ERP systems, the customer and the user are probably the same organization. Here it is important to understand the different people, or personas, you need to communicate with inside that organization. How you communicate with them depends on their role in the company. For example:
- Management: Efficiency and savings potential
- Purchasing: Value for money
- Sales: Ease of use
On top of these there are of course many combinations and hybrids of business models, from very simple to very complex. Whatever the complexity, understanding customers, users and personas makes it easier to evaluate and improve both existing and potential business models.
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