Invest NI wants to promote ‘Innovation Driven Enterprises’ (IDEs) which, it says, are young, early-stage companies with the potential to develop new innovative products and services, and succeed on a global scale. However, in this context, a relevant entry on the Invest NI website has the heading: ‘The criteria to become an Invest NI customer’. The website makes it clear that what Invest NI is actually referring to are its potential clients: the IDEs it wishes to support because they should in turn enhance our economy. But referring to them, not as clients, but as ‘customers’ raises the question: what is a customer? asks Prof. Simon Bridge
In normal use the word customer refers a person, or organisation, who is willing to pay money in exchange for something. Prior to the invention of money, such ‘commercial’ transactions were either done on a direct exchange basis or trusting for future reciprocation of some sort. That, however, often took time to arrange, so the availability of something, either a good or a token, which could last and be used for other exchanges in turn, greatly facilitated the process.
Consequently, instead of the two parties to a deal each having to be in possession of a good or service the other wanted, one party can have a good or service and the other party can pay for it with money – and the one with the money is commonly called the customer. Thus customers buy things and sellers try in turn to attract them in order to get their money. Consequently wise businesses treat their customers well, not because they are called ‘customers’, but because they have money to spend and they want them to feel inclined to spend that money with those businesses.
What is a customer
Invest NI’s clients do not pay Invest NI (except indirectly as tax payers) – instead they hope to get money from Invest NI by offering something that Invest NI apparently wants and has money to ‘buy’. Invest NI may wish to treat its clients well, but calling them ‘customers’ does not change the dynamic that Invest NI is the customer with the money which it can pay to clients if those clients can offer what Invest NI wants to buy. Therefore, if organisations like Invest NI are going to refer to their clients as ‘customers’, we are going to need a different word for the people or organisations who have money and are prepared to pay it for the products or services on offer.
Because they want Invest NI’s money and support, its clients will try to tell Invest NI what it wants to hear in order to get that money – as in other situations sellers will similarly try to sweet talk customers. Hence the expression that “the customer is always right” (even when they are wrong). Of course a good commercial deal is a win-win arrangement when both parties are better off as a result – but nevertheless it is the customer who pays the money and the seller who tries to persuade the customer to part with it. So sellers want to please customers, not because they are called ‘customers’, but because they have the money the sellers want – and they will try by various means to get it including, in some cases, by subterfuge and misleading claims. Hence another well-used and relevant phrase: caveat emptor (or buyer beware).
Therefore calling clients ‘customers’ is likely to be misleading and possibly actually harmful as it suggests that Invest NI does not understand its relationships. Aware clients will still need to treat Invest NI as the customer because it has the money – but Invest NI staff who do try to treat clients as customers are liable to drop their guard and not realise the temptation of those clients to try to get Invest NI’s money by any means.
Invest NI has tried to use this language before and LEDU did before that. I even remember one LEDU director saying that this use was appropriate because other businesses such as the banks gave money to their ‘customers’. Actually what she was referring to was the banks lending money to their customers – which they do for a fee (the interest) and the net flow of money is from the customer to the bank. In reality the IDEs that Invest NI want to assist are not its ‘customers’ in any normal use of the word. So why use that word?
