The word for the customer

First of the month, half the region already away, and the only document anyone opens today is last week's report. The person who pays for all of it appears in it four times and not once as a person. She is footfall. She is traffic. She is a cover. She is a user.

Every seat I have sat in had its own noun for her. In the agency she was an audience, a room measured by how many are in it. In the brand she was a consumer, a word for somebody in the act of using something up. From the platform side she was an account, and on a bad day a segment. In a restaurant she is a cover, which is a place setting rather than a guest.

None of it is wrong inside the building. A business has to count something, and you cannot count a woman.

The trouble is that the noun does not stay in the meeting. It walks into the brief, and out of the brief into the copy, and the sentence that arrives carries the temperature of the word it started from. Write to footfall and you get a line about driving footfall. Write to a user and you get onboarding and engagement, words nobody has ever used about a place they like going to.

No adjective rescues that. Neither does a tone of voice document, because the register was decided before anybody opened a file.

So the cheapest edit available in a quiet month is not to the copy. It is to the noun in the room. Say the guest. Say the reader. Say the woman ordering for four on a Thursday because nobody at her house wants to cook. The writing changes on its own, and nobody had to be told to write better.