What’s the difference, if one at all, between customers and consumers?
Thanks.
My general observation, from the viewpoint of retail, is: you manipulate the consumer, the customer manipulates you.
I always thought it was: the customer buys it, the consumer uses it.
I work in a soap manufacturing plant (Dove if you must ask) and our customers are Walmart and CVS while our consumers are the millions of people taking baths and showers.
online classifieds – dealers are our customers (who pay us money for services), consumers are ordinary citizens (who consume the dealers listings we provide)
Auto repair – everyone with a car is a consumer. Those who deal with me are (my) customers.
Veterinarian-- I am paid by clients (“customer” is wrong-sounding) for work done on patients.
They tend to be interchangeable since the customer is often the consumer.
Maybe, but not really.
For example, anytime something is bought that is for resale, or is a part or raw material used in manufacturing something that will be resold, then the customer is not the consumer. The customer will resell the item instead of consuming it. Sales tax laws hinge on this distinction. In the states where I’m aware of the law, consumers pay sales tax (if there is such a tax) but resellers and manufacturers don’t.
These types of sales are a big chunk of the total business that goes on. I don’t have figures, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most items are passed through some middleman (such as a dealer, retailer, or reseller) before it is sold to a consumer.
So while pretty much everything eventually gets sold to a customer who is also the consumer, a big part of it is also sold (maybe multiple times) to customers who aren’t consumers, and who resell it.
Resellers are not typically called consumers.
I think of consumers as the ultimate end customers of a product or service. For most finished goods products, the consumer and the customer is the same person – think of all the stuff sold in grocery stores. But there are component products, like the alternator in your car, where the customer is the auto shop and the consumer is the car or car owner.
But they’re called “customers” rather often. 
vetbridge: Some organizations use ‘client’ instead of ‘customer’; it’s rather like Walmart using ‘associate’ instead of ‘employee’. ‘Client’ is the usual term for a person seeking professional services, as from a doctor, lawyer, veterinarian, architect, etc., so I guess some corporations think it appears to elevate the status of people buying things from them if they call them ‘clients’. (But anyone receiving a service is a ‘client’, so it also counts for hairdressers and financial services.)
I think people would rather think of themselves as ‘customers’ or ‘clients’ than ‘consumers’; consumer is a rather objectifying term. TellMeI’mNotCrazy’s definition is right, but I think another layer to it is that ‘customers’ are what you call them when they can hear you, and ‘consumers’ is a term you use when they can’t. Sort of like ‘user’ in IT; you call people who use your system ‘users’ among other IT people, but you don’t call them ‘users’ when you talk to one of them.
Which is why I said it isn’t really appropriate to use customer and consumer interchangeably. Resellers (and dealers, distributors, manufacturers, etc.) are typically customers, but not consumers.
In addition to the immediate purchaser vice end-user points already made above …
As an idiom, “consumer” seemes to me to refer to the public en masse, as in “consumer activist group”, or “consumer safety”. The “consumers” in those phrases aren’t specific people, but rather classes of people.
A business can refer to its “customers” as a group but more often, even at retail, they’re still thought of as an aggregation of individuals. “Consumers” are more an undifferentiated mass.
Also, there are products whose end-user is not a person, but rather an business or industrial setting. Darn few people own their own forklift for example. they’re manufactured, resold through some number of middlemen, and are finally bought by an end-user company.
That end-user is a customer of its supplier, but I have a hard time stretching the definition of “consumer” to include the ABC Warehousing Company who bought and used the forklift.
Bottom line: I see “consumer” as a gender neuitral replacement for “homemaker” as used in the 1960s, but expanded from simply household mainenance products & groceries to cover all manner of individual purchases; cars, computers, TVs, etc.
How about a simple: Customers buy products; Consumers buy.