Customer vs Client

While this post is directed towards the photography profession, its application reaches many other service industries. In my other life as a professional pilot, our passengers are not just airline customers. The care and dedication we provide to our passengers convenience, needs, and most important safety goes unchallenged by the airline industry. Our passengers are not our customers, but our valued clients. If you compare the definition of the two following terms you will find my paraphrasing accurate.

Customer

A person  that buys goods or services from a store or business.

Client

A person using the services of a professional or company tailor-made to that persons specific needs.

The telling difference is in the words tailor-made and specific needs. A customer becomes a client when the provider of the service invests their time and effort into the betterment of the client. We have a responsibility to make our subjects look as best as we possibly can. Best light, best posing, best post processing are all tools that we use to tailor our services to provide an exceptional product to our clients.

Without seeming to be too direct, I propose the following based on the above inference of these two similar yet distinctively different words. 

• If you want to be a customer, go to Wal-Mart to get your portraiture. You will save money for sure. Unless you frequent this type of service often, I doubt if they will remember you the next time you come in to buy another product. Chances are there will be different people at the location on your next visit.
• If you want a client experience that address your specific needs, to be the focus of attention, the purpose of the experience, and the motivation that drives the photographer, seek out a professional photographer to capture the most special times of your life. Invest in the documentation of your personal and family history.

Our intent is to maintain a client relationship much more than that of a customer. Every senior portrait is a future engagement/wedding client. Each wedding client is a future mom with baby portraiture. This expresses a relationship with a client that goes well beyond just stopping by a big box store photo studio for an Easter photo with a bunny. It is a lifetime photographic relationship.

Well there is some food for thought to start off the week with.

Take care... Doug