Who Is Your Customer?

“Do not design for yourself. Design for your customer. Engineers are their worst enemy.” I wrote this in the margin of a book I studied in 1998 [1], right before I earned my undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering.

That concept has stuck with me throughout my study, practice, management, and teaching of product development. The concept is sound and should always be remembered: The customer matters. Our job is to get the customer what they want. We must interact with, listen to, and observe the customer to identify and understand their needs.

But the notion of customer is significantly more complicated and important than what I originally thought. The purpose of this article is to breakdown and list out the types of customers to consider when designing any product.

Customer Layers

The definition of customer is complicated and layered because the customer is rarely a single entity, or a single group of people. While many people consider the end user to be the customer, there are often more customers than just end users. For example, Apple iPhones are manufactured by Foxconn. This means Apple is Foxconn’s customer; Foxconn must please Apple by taking and fulfilling orders. Among other outlets, Apple iPhones are sold by cell carriers such as AT&T. This means that AT&T places large orders with Apple. This makes AT&T one of Apple’s largest customers. AT&T sells phones to end users bundled with mobile subscriptions, which means end users are AT&T’s customers.

Recognizing the presence of these customer layers is critical to product success. Product designers must consider the needs of the manufacturer, the brand, the retailer, and the end user, among others. The full set of customers – or the full set of people with an interest or concern in the outcome – are often referred to as product stakeholders.

Decomposition of Customer Layers

To decompose and make sense of multiple layers of customers, I have found it useful to ask the following four questions, and then consider the possible answers, which are shown in the bullets below:

1. Who will use the product?

The end user is the ultimate external customer [1]. This is who uses the product. This is the most basic idea of the customer – the user of the product. Even so, the end user may have multiple forms, including:

·  Customer as a single end user. Generally speaking, the end user of a smartphone, for example, is a single person. Rarely do people share smartphones.

·  Customer as multiple end users with similar needs. An automobile is reasonably shared by multiple drivers in a single family. Thus, there are multiple end users with similar needs that are hopefully fulfilled by a single product that they share.

·  Customer as multiple end users with disparate needs. Consider a hospital bed. Who is the customer; the patient who lays in it or the medical worker who moves or adjusts the bed for specific scenarios? Both are considered end users of the hospital bed, and both have different needs relative to what the bed can do.  

·  Customer as a whole market of end users. A large and diverse market can also be considered the customer. This is where a single product ends up being used by a wide variety of people. For example, consider a microwave oven and its users and use cases. A single microwave design will be used by men, women, children, of all ages and classes. It may be used at home or in an office, in a lunchroom, or near a vending machine. To be successful, such products need to be widely acceptable.

Though these different kinds of end users are generally understandable with these examples, specific products do not always cleanly represent just one type of customer. To illustrate this consider the smartphone again. Though a smartphone is described above as having a single user, parents of young children will know that their smartphone is often used by their child to play games, talk to extended family, or watch YouTube. Further, a single smartphone design (for example the iPhone 12) is typically developed to meet the needs of an entire market of end users (old and young, for example). Finally, most successful smartphones are designed with both the person dialing and the person receiving in mind, which manifests itself in such microphone technology as ambient noise reduction thus making a better listening experience for the person receiving a call. In this way, the smartphone has multiple end users with disparate needs to consider.

2. Who will buy the product?

Ultimately, the purchaser has to find enough value in the product to buy it. In the most basic of cases, the end user is also the purchaser. But this is only one model for who purchases the product, as illustrated below.

·  End user as purchaser: Consider a soccer ball. The end user is often the person who purchased the soccer ball. Thus the soccer ball must be desirable to the end user.

·  Gift giver as the purchaser: The soccer ball may have been purchased as a gift, say by a parent for a child. Here, the soccer ball must also be desirable to the gift giver; perhaps aptly priced or easily shipped.

·  Organization as the purchaser: The soccer ball may be purchased by a team or club in an amateur or professional setting. Or purchased by a city’s parks and recreation department for city sporting events.

·  Retailer as the purchaser: If the soccer ball was purchased at a department store, the store’s purchasing staff bought a number of balls to place for sale at their store.

·  Convoluted entity as the purchaser: Consider the convoluted nature of healthcare in the United States. Imagine a costly procedure prescribed by a doctor. The doctor makes a decision that they do not pay for, nor does the insurance company typically pay for it, instead the employer of the patient, and the patient share the cost when they pay the insurance premiums. As the bulk funder of the procedure, the patient’s employer has generally no influence on the prescription made by the doctor.

3. Who will influence the purchasing decision?

Another important customer to consider is the person who will influence the purchase of the product.

·  Self-influence. This scenario is the most basic and common. It is when any person determines on his or her own that they want to purchase a product. In this case, the person influencing and the buyer are the same person/entity.  

·  Bottom-up purchasing influence: Consider a child’s toy. To acquire the product, the child tells the parent they want the toy. If the parent believes that gifting the toy is a good idea, the parent purchases the toy and gives it to the child. In this scenario, the child influences the purchase. To do so, the child must become aware of the toy, perhaps through an ad or a printed toy catalog. The child also has to know enough about this product to describe it to their parents. Parents then need to find the product, and be sufficiently moved to purchase it. In this case, both the child and the parent are customers of the product. While this is obvious in a parent child relationship, the same condition exists in any scenario where the person who will push to acquire the product cannot afford the product on their own, or would otherwise not be expected to purchase it. A new piece of manufacturing equipment  is an example of this, such as when a machinist requests that the shop he works for purchase a 5-axis milling machine to expand the shop’s capabilities. 

·  Top-down purchasing influence: Closely related to the scenario above is where someone of authority requires subordinates to purchase a particular product. For example, a professor may require that a book or tool be purchased to complete a course. Similarly, a doctor may prescribe a particular medicine. The government may require the presence of catalytic converters on internal combustion engines.

Whoever significantly influences the purchasing decision is a customer that must be considered.  

4. Who has requested the creation of the product?

While there are various people who could request the creation of a product, this question refers largely to the person/entity who needs design artifacts made during the product development process. For example:

·  Client as the customer: Whenever a product is commissioned (designed especially for a particular need), the commissioning person/entity is the client. It is essential to consider the client as a customer with needs that must be met. Client needs often have to do with the on-time, on-budget, on-quality delivery of design work. Most often the client needs the culminating artifacts of major phases in the product development process [2], such as a final set of refined product sketches, renderings of the final product, final engineering drawings, or a production plan for moving on to mass production.

·  Boss as the customer: Whenever the boss is asking for a particular deliverable, it is helpful to consider the boss a customer. Like the client, a boss typically has needs relative to the on-time, on-budget, on-quality delivery of design work, and the efficient use of company resources to achieve it. Deliverables to the boss might be a set of preliminary concept sketches, a benchmark study, a works-like or looks-like prototype, a set of engineering drawings for review, a test report, and more.

·  Team member as the customer: When considering the entire product development team as a design supply chain, where one person takes the work of another and builds upon it, anyone downstream should be considered a customer of the design work. Designers should seek to understand who needs to use their work and how.

·  Professor as the customer: When doing design work in an educational setting, it is prudent to consider the professor and graders as customers. They often need your work to appear in a particular format, or to be constructed in a particular way to facilitate the assessment of the work.

·  Manufacturer as the customer: Designers are rarely the manufacturer. Therefore designers are wise to consider the manufacturer as an important customer of the design work. Designers should understand the needs and capabilities of the manufacturer and design their products such that they are understandable and desirable to the manufacturer. 

Summary

It’s true that we should design for our customers and not ourselves. To do that, however, we must understand who our customer really is. At least four types of customers should be considered when doing design work. Successful products generally meet the needs of all four customer types; the end user, the purchaser, the purchase influencer, and the design requestor.

Why is this so important for design engineers to understand? And is it true that engineers are their worst enemy in this regard? It is generally unnatural for us as engineers to imagine the human behind the requirements we design for. This makes us particularly susceptible to not really knowing who our customer is. Even if we step away from the technical aspects of a product and acknowledge the presence of a customer and their needs, we are unlikely to dive deep into the layers of customers as described in this article. Without that deep dive, our product will have a higher risk of failing to meet customer needs.

References

[1]   (The edition I studied in 1998) K. Ulrich and S. Eppinger, Product Design and Development, Chapter 3: Identifying Customer Needs, 1995, McGraw-Hill, New York.

[2]   C. Mattson and C. Sorensen, Product Development: Principles and Tools for Creating Desirable and Transferable Designs, 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham.