Client vs. Customer vs. Consumer: 4 Key Areas of Difference

The word client refers to people who establish long-term relationships with a service provider or product. These professional relationships develop when someone (or some company) needs to use a service for personal or commercial purposes regularly. In a sense, clients function as long-term subscribers in their interactions with companies. In some cases, this can be literally true—software-as-a-service or SaaS companies offer their clients literal subscriptions to use their products.

For example, a graphic design agency might prefer to develop a small but loyal customer base for revenue purposes rather than rely on a business model that focuses on brief, individualized, and transactional customer relationships. This makes the company’s reselling process easier and enables the employees to focus on satisfying specific clients rather than trying to please a wider market base.

The word “customer” descends from the Latin word “custumarius,” a reference to tax or toll collectors. The term customer now refers to someone who pays rather than collects payment. More specifically, customers are a group of people who enter into monetary transactions to buy goods and services. For example, a customer is someone who goes into a grocery store to buy products with no firm commitment to shop there again.

Still, many companies do a lot to ensure the customer experience causes people to come back for more purchases. This might include advertising more aggressively toward a target audience or establishing a customer support department to ensure customers have everything they need for a satisfactory experience.

The definition of consumer can be somewhat malleable, but it fundamentally means someone who puts a product to use—in other words, the end user. For instance, food wholesalers might be customers (they buy products in bulk to sell to other companies), but the people who eat the food products are the actual consumers.

Though people often use the terms client, consumer, and customer interchangeably, there are some core differences to consider. Here are four areas worth thinking about:

1. 1. Company type: Different companies use different models based on whether they’re pursuing short-term customers or long-term clients. For instance, digital marketing or advertising agencies, B2B companies, health care providers, and law firms often rely on a smaller base of long-term clients for revenue. By comparison, retail stores, restaurants, and grocers try to generate a larger base of transactional customers. These clients and customers might or might not directly consume the products they purchase.
2. 2. Length of time: The consumer or customer journey is generally shorter than the client journey. Customer relationships are all about the short term, sometimes only consisting of a one-time sale with a retailer or restaurant. Client relationships retain professional services—whether from an agency, distributor, law firm, or some other entity—for much longer periods of time. Consumers can be in either a short-term customer or a long-term client relationship—the term “consumer” has more to do with whether or not a person meets their own needs through a transaction than that transaction’s duration of time.
3. 3. Marketing strategy: Depending on whether a company hopes to attract customers or clients, they might take a different approach to marketing. For example, an amusement park would probably use customer-based metrics, aiming to generate multiple new customers daily in their marketing. In contrast, client-based businesses might opt for a smaller target market but with higher retention. In either case, they must leave their clients and customers happy consumers.
4. 4. Relationship style: Client-centric companies provide a lot more personal attention to their individual clients—after all, they’ll be in a long-term fiduciary relationship with them. This might mean adopting CRM software, developing incentivizing loyalty programs, or hiring people to manage specific accounts. Customer-focused companies still aim for customer satisfaction, but they might not tailor it so specifically to individuals. The goal in either case is to turn the potential client or customer into a consumer—a direct end user of the goods or services that they offer.

Though these words each emphasize different things, they have a significant degree of overlap, so you can use them interchangeably when speaking in more general terms. Clients are long term, devoted types of customers, and loyal customers are often types of consumers. Although a certain context might call for one over the other, the differences are largely semantic most of the time.

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