People are people. Always. For instance, throughout the day people might consume food, gas, electricity, media, beer and more, but they remain people, not consumers.
It’s a topic cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken picked up and ran with on Spreadable Media.
My preferred term is “multiplier.” Consider this sentence, amended from a story in the Wall Street Journal: “American multipliers spend more than $8 trillion a year on everything from popcorn to Porsches and eye exams to electricity.” Or consider this conversational fragment from the corridors of a branding firm: “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see what the multiplier thinks.”
“multiplier.” A “multiplier” is someone who will treat the good, service, or experience as a starting point. Multipliers will build in some of their own intelligence and imagination. They will take possession of a cultural artifact and make it more detailed, more contextually responsive, more culturally nuanced, and, lest we forget the point of the exercise, more valuable.
Multipliers it is then.
