Why we say audiences

A customer is someone who has already paid you. That's a useful group to study, and we study it a lot. It's also, by definition, the people you've already won.

That's why the company isn't called Customer Strategies. Start with customers and you design your growth around the people you've got. You can make them happier and get more from them. You can't see who's missing.

Consumers are a wider group: everyone who buys in your category, from you or from someone else. That's better. But the word is still about buying. It leaves out people who rarely or never pay, yet shape how far a brand reaches and what people think of it: the fan who talks about you more than she buys from you, the person who'll be in your category in five years' time, the person whose recommendation a friend acts on.

An audience includes all of them. It's everyone who is aware of you, interested in you or fond of you, whether or not they've bought anything. The word carries the idea of fandom, a relationship that isn't only a transaction.

Music, television and entertainment understand this without being told. Those industries are where most of our team grew up. An artist's audience is far bigger than the people who bought the last record, and a label that only studied those buyers would never find the next ones. We think the same is true in categories that don't talk about fans at all.

So our work starts at the widest level. We look at the whole audience first, then profile the consumers within it, then the customers within those. Each layer is useful. Customer data tells you about loyalty, value and churn. Category data tells you who you're competing for. But if growth is the question, the audience is where to start.

It's also where most of our framework lives. Of our Now, Next, Not Yet and Never audiences, only the first is mostly customers. The others are mostly people who haven't bought yet, which is the point.

Hence the name.

What to do on Monday

• Work out what share of your research budget, or your survey sample, is people who already buy from you. If it's most of it, you're studying the people you've already won.
• Name one group that matters to your brand but doesn't buy much: fans, recommenders, future buyers. Write down what you actually know about them.
• In your next research brief, define the population as the audience first, then the category, then your customers.

The audience-first approach is the starting point of every Now+Next project.

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