Jobs-to-be-done is a framework for better understanding customer behavior. While conventional marketing focuses on market demographics or product attributes, Jobs Theory gets to the root cause of behavior to expose the functional, social and emotional dimensions that explain why customers make the choices they do. People don’t simply buy products or services – they pull them into their lives to make progress. We call this progress the “job” they are trying to get done, and understanding this opens a world of innovation possibilities.
Many CEOs feel that innovation is critical for industry and growth but are really dissatisfied with the success of innovation in their organization. A McKinsey & Company poll showed that 84% of global executives reported that innovation was extremely important to their growth strategies, but 94% were dissatisfied with their organizations’ innovation performance. In order to innovate effectively, companies should go beyond big data and social listening by qualitatively engaging with consumers to better understand these jobs-to-be-done.
McDonald's had a boatload of data on milkshake consumption. They conducted research to figure out how to improve the taste and how to make more varieties, but sales didn’t seem to improve. They needed to focus on the job that the milkshake performed, rather than simply the taste or the time of day that milkshakes were consumed.
So what Clayton Christensen, academic and business consultant who developed the theory of "disruptive innovation," and his team did is observe people to learn more about what job the milkshake played in their day.
What he found out was that many people consumed milkshakes in the morning as a way to either fight off boredom during a long morning commute or to satisfy their hunger for a longer period of time than other breakfast items. Given how viscous the milkshake was, it took the consumer about 25 minutes to finish it and no other fast-food solution took nearly as long to consume. And that “job” was one the company had never focused on. It opened up new possibilities for milkshakes across day parts, and pitted milkshakes against a different competitive set.
A New Framework
A lot of the big data and information that organizations are using to identify opportunities in the market has to do with correlation data. Using analytics like social media or purchase data can be very useful, but won’t get to the root cause of the behavior. Christensen created his jobs-to-be-done theory to understand consumer choice in a way that no correlation data could do because it actually focused on the “why.”
Jobs-to-be-done has become a very successful framework because it's easy to understand and has proven to be an effective model in implementing innovation. Plus, it doesn’t require a large segmentation study to get there. In today’s rapidly changing market, we need to refresh our thinking on jobs more often to shorten the shelf life of any given study.
The Components of the Job
A job has four components: the person you want to help, the progress they want to make, the circumstances they’re in and the obstacles they need to overcome.
When you think about consumer choice in the jobs framework, rather than looking independently at what the need is, you need to holistically look at the person's behavior or experience. Look at the process the consumer is going through and the Job that the product does in that context.
In other words, a person is making some kind of progress in their day. Within the circumstances of that specific moment, they typically have to overcome some kind of obstacle to achieve that goal or meet that need. The magic in jobs-to-be-done is using human interaction to understand functional, emotional and social attributes.
In this example, we can look at how people hire and fire different brands from different categories from their “jobs.” They could “hire” frozen lasagna, Hamburger Helper, a delivery service like Freshly or take and bake pizza. People also fire brands from jobs. For example, if traffic is bad and Papa John's pizza is out of the way, that brand could get fired for being in the wrong location.
You can use the jobs-to-be-done framework to identify gaps in the market and evaluate your competitive set, but if you define your competitive set too narrowly, you may miss the job that your brand is actually good at. A useful starting point is to identify what jobs people have based on the products they use and the features those products have.
So where might the jobs-to-be-done framework fit in your process of developing innovation for your organization? What are the steps to take?
Step 1: Hypothesis
Step 2: Discovery
Step 3: Mapping
Step 4: Solutions
Some people use in-house teams to explore jobs-to-be-done and some hire outside consultants and agencies to assist. The benefit of going in-house is that it’s typically done faster than going outside your organization. It’s fairly scalable, where you can repeat the process over and over again for different aspects of the business. It's also less costly and gets the team engaged and bought into the process.
When going outside the organization, consultants can be very helpful from a time and convenience perspective. They can take on some of the hypothesizing and discovering efforts and lend their expertise and training to the process. Most importantly, having an outside perspective can make all the difference.
At Digsite, our role falls somewhere in the middle. We have a platform that allows in-house teams to do this kind of work themselves, but we also offer expert consultants and logistical support to set up studies, build hypothesis and create research reports. We also partner with outside agencies that can help with team facilitation and concept ideation.
Some of the challenges that we've seen in agile jobs-to-be-done work relate to certain choices made by organizations.
The Obstacle: Using a convenient sample.
The Solution: Find the right sample to dig deeper.
The Obstacle: Non-researcher questions.
The Solution: Use semi-structured activities.
The Obstacle: Being too functional.
The Solution: Create implicit activities to understand emotions.
Investing in jobs-to-be-done solutions will require buy-in. One way to help secure that buy-in is validation. It’s important to understand the relevance, frequency and level of disruption that the obstacles related to that job you have. Historically, this has been done by going back to correlational data (like social listening and transactional data) to find evidence of your jobs. But there are also quick, quantitative research methods that can help validate and prioritize your focus.
For example, with Digsite Pulse, you can test up to 20 jobs in a single study, drilling down to confirm your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses among consumers with the highest relevance and frequency.
Want to learn how the Digsite platform can help you uncover and validate jobs more effectively without the guesswork?
Check out our fact sheet to learn more about Digsite's capabilities.