Differentiating customer and consumer research

Editor's note: Sophie Grieve-Williams is a graphic designer at FlexMR. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared under the title “Animated Insights: Customer vs. Consumer Research.”

All those in customer-facing industries know the terms customer and consumer. In certain circles those terms are used almost interchangeably, but are they really the same?

Consumer research is a well-known practice that brands use to make sure they gain vital insights on those who consume their products and services. Through this consumer research, brands can fully understand the audience they are catering to and retain them by building the perfect products and services that they need.

Customer communities are a common tool to use in consumer research, but only if those consumers are also the customers – and the variance here can mean the difference between success and failure for that brand.

Differences between customer and consumer research

So, let’s go over this definition again: Consumers consume the product, customers buy the product. They can be the same person, which is why these terms can be and are sometimes used interchangeably, but this isn’t always the case. Customers can buy a product for someone else to consume. Consumers can consume a product bought for them by someone else who becomes the customer.

The difference this makes is drastic, because brands can’t gather data on how the product or service works from the customer if they are not also the consumer, and they can’t ask the consumer about the customer journey if they weren’t the customer.

Customer research focused on the customer experience only considers the cumulative impact of every interaction the customer and brand share and has the capability to facilitate a co-creative approach to any upgrades and innovations to the customer experience. Consumer research focused primarily on the consumers’ experience but can see how both consumer and customer experiences tie in together if the research sample is populated with respondents who are both customer and consumer in one.

Challenges both research types bring

Conducting research on customers vs. consumers has specific challenges, some that cross over but a few that are applicable only to either customers or consumers. For example, a challenge that affects both customer and consumer research is respondent engagement – for there will always be those respondents who don’t really care to provide detail on anything asked even when they agree to take part in the research.

One challenge of customer research that doesn’t impact consumer research is the tasks centered on the customer journey, figuring out pain points and devising strategies to mitigate them. A task that applies to consumer research over customer research is the product development tasks – making sure to get consumers who actually use those products to help design the next iteration with better features will be better than just asking the customers who paid for the product.

Conducting research effectively leads to benefits

When consumer and customer research is conducted well, there are some great benefits to be reaped from innovating and evolving current business strategies for better impact, to spotting new trends, patterns and unidentified needs. How is consumer and customer research conducted effectively? There are a few best practices to take note of:

  • Designing recruitment and customizing segmentation to ensure insight teams are communicating with only relevant respondents (i.e., making sure to get the customers needed rather than consumers, or vice versa)
  • Tailoring the engagement tactics used on the sample to boost participant engagement both inside and outside of scheduled research tasks
  • Designing the research specifically towards the target audience for maximum engagement – while employing specific tactics can help boost engagement, designing the research can provide a better base for insight experts to springboard off.
  • Encouraging stakeholder engagement for better relevance – only they know the relevant business contexts needed to ensure the research is relevant and will generate the best insights for the current problems impacting the organization.