EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Jobs to Be Done is a framework that treats every purchase as an act of hiring. Customers do not buy products so much as hire them to make progress on a job. Those jobs fall into three categories: functional, emotional, and social. Jobs stay stable over time even as the products serving them change, which makes them a more durable thing to build around than product features. Marketing Myopia is the opposite failure, where a company defines itself by what it sells rather than the job it performs. It’s a blind spot that is the cause of many famous failures, like why the railroads lost transportation and why Hollywood nearly lost entertainment to television.
What does your company do? If you answered with a description of your product’s features, you might be at risk of making an expensive but common marketing mistake. Customers are not really buying the thing you make. They are trying to get somewhere, and your product is one of several options for getting them there.
As we continue to explore the Marketing Funnel, now we’re moving from the Awareness phase to the Consideration phase. In this part of their journey, the customer needs confidence in your offering. Your role is to build trust.
The Power of Jobs to Be Done
You can’t build trust with someone you don’t understand. That’s why every strong marketing strategy begins with a baseline of customer research. Before customers will trust you, you need to see the world through their eyes and grasp what they are truly trying to accomplish.
One of the most powerful ways to do this is through the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework. The late Harvard professor Clayton Christensen popularized the idea in Competing Against Luck. He explains:
When we buy a product, we essentially ‘hire’ something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem.
A question to consider: Do you really need a kitchen knife, or are you hiring a tool that helps you slice ingredients quickly, prepare a beautiful meal, and impress your guests at a dinner party? The job is not simply owning a knife. The real job is creating a dining experience worth sharing. Once you view products this way, you stop focusing only on features and begin to understand the progress customers are trying to make in their lives.
If Christensen brought Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) to the mainstream, Anthony Ulwick was an early pioneer. Ulwick’s book, Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice, outlines a structured methodology for defining and analyzing customer jobs. At its core, jobs theory encourages you to ask, What is the customer really trying to accomplish beyond just buying a product?
Ulwick explains that jobs are stable over time, independent of geography, and not tied to any single solution. In other words, the underlying job remains constant, even as products and technologies evolve.
He also distinguishes three types of jobs:
Functional jobs: The practical tasks or outcomes customers want to complete
Emotional jobs: The feelings customers want to experience or the ones they want to avoid while getting the core job done
Social jobs: The way customers want to be perceived by others as they pursue that outcome
Understanding jobs at this deeper level gives you a focused lens on customer needs and helps you avoid being trapped in promoting only surface-level product features.
Avoid Marketing Myopia
Marketing Myopia is the opposite of Jobs to Be Done…
