Jobs to be Done

Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples.

— Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos knows one thing: Customers rarely know anything about what they want. But every customer has something that they need to do. This fact is the focal point of focusing on Jobs to be Done, rather than the traditional criteria used for personas. 

Introduction to Business introduced the idea of creating customer personas to best determine the audience being targeted with a product. Personas are based largely on 4 different criteria: Demographics (facts like age, education and weight), psychographics (beliefs and worldview), geographics (location of the customer) & behaviors (what we do in life). Traditional marketing states the accuracy of these four elements helps business hone in a groups of individuals who are more likely to purchase a product from a business. Unfortunately, this strategy has failed to work for some businesses.

The video above notes that customers have jobs. Some jobs are more important, some are less important. Those jobs come with many pains and gains to the customer. If the primary concern of a customer is the job, then do we really care about their demographics, psychographics, geographics or behaviors? Maybe a little but they run a clear second place. 

The reality is the focus on of marketers on knowing more and more about customers is taking firms in the wrong direction. Essentially, all the data we are acquiring about people through Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter may not be the data we need. The point of this lesson is to provide a basic understanding of when and why a customer's job could be their most important key to marketing effectively.

When we buy a product, we essentially "hire" it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, we will rehire the product. If the product fails, we "fire" the product and look for alternatives or substitutes. 

Additional Reading

Student Activity

• • For the company we are providing marketing services for, answer the following questions: 

    • • What are the key demographics for individuals purchasing the product?

      • Why are they purchasing the product? 

      • What are people gaining by purchasing the product? 

Sources

• • https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done