Together with famous paradigm shift that took us from push to pull, we have discovered that consumers are not only some individuals aged 25-45 consuming products and services, they are also or rather first of all are people. 
I control myself when writing or talking and try to replace word consumer with people / person as often as I can. Of course from time to time the C-word slips from my mouth and I don't see anything wrong in it. I avoid C-word mainly to clear my mind when working with human insights and break through the single track thinking. There is nothing bad in using word consumer, after all this is one of our roles we play in everyday life. What's important here is to remember that being consumer doesn't define us, doesn't determine our personality, our lifestyle or media usage. We, humans play variety of roles on daily basis, we are employees, mothers, siblings or friends, and consumer is on of the roles. We need to understand or at least be aware of different roles people play in different situation and different needs connected to those. The point is that people even though they are consumers, they don't want to be treated as consumers but as human beings.
There are some protests and actions going on against the bad habit of calling people for consumers. 22 squared company working with branding through friending has established the advocacy group against calling people consumers on Facebook. And now they took the resistance against C-word a step further - they have created their own web script for FireFox that eliminates the CONSUMERS word in all your web pages, and replaces it with people / person. It looks pretty cool and it is an impressive piece of work. Consumers vanished, only people were left. But don't exaggerate and keep in mind, we are still consumers from time to time and this role has influence on the choices we make.
