Marketing the Jobs to be Done

Theodore Levitt was almost right when he said “People don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole.” When we consider JTBD theory, we can take this thought one step further and say that, “No one really cares exactly how big the hole is, they just want to mount a shelf on the wall.” 

Essentially, JTBD helps you clarify buyer intent. And it’s your job as a product marketer to address your buyer’s intent in your messaging. 

Instead of attaching value to what products are, value should attach to what products do for customers. In other words, stop trying to communicate value with new and improved product features, and start designing more integrated product experiences that are valuable because of what they enable customers to get done in a particular context.

• What progress is the buyer trying to make?

• What unmet needs can your product solve?

Marketing the Job to Be Done: the drill bit

Rather than talking about millimeter width, steel density—if you’re targeting apartment renters who want to hang pictures. Talk about what they can do with it, not the feature specifications. 

Going deeper and asking specific questions around the JTBD will help you refine your messaging so you only focus on how your product solves the real problems your customers care about. For example, answer questions like: 

• What problem is our product solving?

• What’s the job that people are hiring our product for?

  • Hopefully this is the same as the problem your product solves but isn’t necessarily. Keep in mind this might be different than you intend. Are people “hacking” your product or doing edge-case stuff with it? i.e. you thought milkshakes were only for dessert but people eat them for breakfast.

• What are the keywords people are searching for? 

  • Might not be “milkshake” or “smoothie”, but instead simple breakfast (Google maps search for “breakfast” along route to work)

• What other competitors solve this job? 

  • Jobs are solution agnostic so it’s not just McDonald’s vs Burger King.

• What differentiates our product from those competitors and makes us a better solution for the job our customers are hoping to do?

  • Faster purchasing, thicker formula, not too sweet, more protein (rather than more toppings and flavors).

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can get hyper targeted on what matters and cut out the fluff in your landing pages, feature announcement messages and pretty much everything else you create. 

For example, when you know what keywords people are searching for you can target those keywords in your landing pages to boost your SEO and help prospective buyers find and resonate with your solution. 

Marketing the Job to be Done: 1,000 songs in your pocket

Imagine its 2001 and you’re tired of your CD walkman skipping every time you maneuver over a bump on your rollerblades. You’ve seen the commercials for MP3 players and have been thinking about saving up for one but haven’t pulled the trigger. Then you see it. The new iPod commercial: 1,000 songs in your pocket.

iPod wasn’t the first or even necessarily the best MP3 player on the market when it launched in 2001. Plenty of competitors were already selling similar products in the same exact space. But none of them had so clearly articulated the benefit of the MP3 player. Other companies were talking about how many Gigabytes they had (to this day I still have no concept of digital storage space). But Apple talked about how many songs the iPod could hold. Rather than talk about screen size dimensions, Apple said it could fit in your pocket.

And who could forget this ad?

Focus messaging on the job, not the customer

When you understand what your product is hired for, it can inform your entire go-to-market strategy including:

• How you name and package your products and features

• What events you attend/sponsor

• How you organize your marketing website

• How you write your message and copy

• What topics you cover on your blog