It is one of the holy grails of marketing: predictability in new-product innovation. Yet again and again, smart companies spend tens of millions of dollars doing the best research they can, only to have products or services flop in the marketplace.
Our perspective is that the way companies assess and analyze markets shoulders at least part of the blame for this unpredictability. Marketers who segment markets by demographics, or assume that product categories divide the world, can consistently supply the market with offerings that don’t quite connect with consumers—while completely missing high-potential opportunities for innovation. They can continue to push for improvements along dimensions that already overshoot consumer needs, and then complain that commoditization has set in, when looking at the market the right way can highlight attractive avenues for product differentiation.
There must be a better method, one that allows companies to identify real opportunities to create the differentiated products and services that promise extraordinary returns.
We believe that focusing on the “job” the consumer (or customer) is trying to do can assist companies in breaking out of the marketing morass. The jobs-to-be-done model can help companies master the innovation life cycle—improving their ability to spot high-growth opportunities, optimize existing products, and inject life into even the most stagnant categories.
Hiring Products
Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor describe the concept of jobs to be done in Chapter 3 of The Innovator’s Solution (Harvard Business School Press, 2003). It is simple: Customers don’t really buy products; they hire them to do jobs. To identify opportunities to create new growth, first look for important jobs that customers can’t satisfactorily do with available solutions.
Another way to describe a job is as a problem that a customer needs to solve. Remember the phrase attributed to Harvard Business School marketing guru Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill—they want a quarter-inch hole.”
For instance, Intuit’s QuickBooks software makes it easy for small business owners to accomplish an important job: ensure their businesses don’t run out of cash. Before Intuit’s innovation, existing options (e.g., pen and paper, Excel spreadsheets) weren’t good enough to do the job. Professional accounting software packages were actually too good—confusing, and filled with unnecessary features. QuickBooks did the job better than any alternative, and quickly took over the category.
As another example, consider area businesses that advertise in the local newspaper. They place display or classified advertisements, and newspaper companies call them advertisers. Yet what is the real problem that the businesses are trying to solve? The goal is almost never to advertise. Rather, businesses have objectives such as “help us build our brands,” “bring greater predictability to our businesses,” and “improve our ability to attract and retain employees.” Advertising isn’t a job; it is a compensating behavior.
The jobs-to-be-done model is simple but powerful. It shifts the focus from solutions that customers use to problems they can’t adequately solve. The model zeros in on circumstances and constraints surrounding the jobs that customers are trying to do—instead of categorizing customers (1) into demographic groups that can be poor predictors of behavior, (2) by attitudes that might influence purchasing behavior, or (3) by activities they currently perform, often because they don’t have a better alternative. These characteristics are more deeply connected to the best possible solution than any other segmentation scheme.
In short, the jobs-to-be-done model provides a blueprint for innovation: locating that frustrated customer and closing in on the roots of his or her frustration. (See the sidebar, “Defining a job,” for more information.)
Sidebar "Defining a Job"
The jobs-to-be-done model requires first understanding the problems a customer faces in life or business. We find it helpful to push for as much specificity as possible when describing a job. Even if you ultimately choose to become more general, try to identify a customer and a specific problem he or she is attempting to solve. Complete a job statement such as the following: (Customer) wants to (solve a problem) in (this context).
Action words such as minimize, maximize, improve, decrease, and obtain often appear in the problem portion of the statement. And identifying the context is particularly important. For example, trying to access the latest news while you’re on an airplane is a fundamentally different problem than trying to access the latest news while parked in front of your TV. The context influences the solutions you might consider and how you evaluate them.
Next, aim to ascertain the hiring criteria that a customer applies when choosing between solutions. For instance, a teenager attempting to engage with other teenagers might want a solution that is free, uses the latest technology, and is highly interactive. Think beyond functional hiring criteria dimensions, to emotional and social ones as well: The teenager might want a solution that projects “cool” and isn’t “his or her parents’ technology.”
Look at the candidates applying for the job. Historically, the engagement-seeking teenager could hire a cell phone to send a text message to friends, read a teen magazine, or head to the mall. Increasingly, he or she logs on to MySpace or another social networking Web site. These Web sites have succeeded because they fulfill the hiring criteria much better than existing solutions.
Then look for “help wanted” signs, or gaps between what the customer is trying to do and the performance that existing solutions provide. These signs are clear opportunities for new-product innovations. Consider barriers that inhibit a consumer’s ability to do the job. Are existing solutions out of reach, does the consumer just not know what might be available, or does he or she not really care about the job? Often, consumers with a barrier constraining their consumption are high potential targets for consumption.
Finally, make sure you understand why the consumer doesn’t consume. Sometimes consumers choose not to consume because solving a particular problem or doing a certain job just isn’t a priority to them, or they’ve found perfectly adequate solutions to a problem. Confusing disinterest with constrained consumption can lead a company to chase the wrong target.
The Model’s Power
Generally speaking, any successful innovation follows a life cycle. As Exhibit 1 depicts, before there is an innovation there is market demand. Then an innovator discovers a way to tap into that demand. In the early days, the innovator’s key challenge is optimizing the innovation for maximum success, and then finding creative methods of capturing value.
Markets abhor vacuums, so any successful innovator must ward off encroaching competitors. Finally, when the innovation reaches a seeming stage of maturity, the innovator must uncover new ways to revitalize growth. The jobs-to-be-done model can help the marketer in each stage of the innovation life cycle.
Identifying Demand
The jobs-to-be-done model illuminates opportunities to innovate in the marketplace. These might stem from identifying jobs for which existing solutions are ineffective or nonexistent, or pinpointing “employers” who will eagerly hire a new technology or offering.
Spot new growth opportunities. Understanding important and unfulfilled jobs to be done almost always highlights substantial opportunities for growth. As part of a year-long study of the newspaper industry, we worked with a team at The Boston Globe to grasp the problems facing small businesses—in its market—that didn’t consume any of the newspaper’s existing products. (The full text of this “Newspaper Next” project is available at www.newspapernext.org.)
We discovered that, among other things, many small businesses wanted to find more effective methods of making their phones ring with a high-potential customer. Some had a Web site that a college-aged son or daughter designed years ago. Many had heard about new ways to place search advertisements on Web sites such as Google and Yahoo, but thought the programs would be too complex to manage.
The Globe decided to sell small businesses a search-engine marketing program, to provide guaranteed “clicks” to their Web sites. Instead of building its own program, the newspaper chose to use a program that a third-party vendor offered. It estimates that this—and other offerings targeting the jobs of small businesses—could be a multimillion dollar opportunity.
Find markets for new technology. Although companies often aim to develop market understanding before innovating, sometimes the process works in the other direction. In other words, a company frequently starts with a technology and then has to figure out what market has the highest potential for growth. For more details on this approach, read Joe Sinfield’s “A Structured Approach to Technology Assessment” in Strategy & Innovation (September-October 2005, Vol. 3, No. 5).
In these circumstances, begin by assessing the problems the technology could solve, the contexts in which customers could use the technology, and the technology’s performance benefits and liabilities compared with existing solutions. Then consider all of the employers who might be interested in hiring the technology. Ask questions such as the following:
• Who needs to solve the problems that the technology could solve?
• Who would this solution delight, despite its limitations?
• Could customers use this technology where they couldn’t use existing technologies?
For example: In the early 2000s, California-based Linksys had to decide how to commercialize wireless networking technologies. Existing versions of the technology allowed users to wirelessly send data over short distances. Signals degraded rapidly beyond about 300 feet, and provided low levels of security and encryption. Linksys wisely chose to target users looking to network homes or small offices. The technology helped these users address important jobs, and security- and distance-related limitations were irrelevant in that context.
Optimizing Solutions
Identifying the opportunity is never enough. Companies face significant challenges when aiming to introduce solutions that adequately do the innovation job. To deliver a solution that customers are willing to buy, they need to carefully balance price and features.
A staple in the marketing tool kit is the customer survey or focus group, designed to discover what customers really want. All too frequently, these exercises result in wish lists that—if accommodated—will create an all-capable and very expensive offering desirable to no one. Understanding the ways that customers determine value can highlight the trade-offs, between features and price, that they’ll deem tolerable.
Consider the insights a major consumer health company gleaned through applying the jobs-to-be-done model in the area of nutritional products. The company’s initial research efforts uncovered important and unsatisfied jobs. These ranged from treating heart disease and cancer to maintaining basic health. Its original inclination was to generate a doeverything product, to try to at least tangentially stave off many of these conditions.
However, more in-depth research identified that consumers really wanted solutions specific to them as individuals. A doeverything product would actually provide too much performance on some dimensions and way too little on others. The company recognized this issue; it is now pursuing focused formulations for particular high-demand health conditions that tend to coexist in the population.
Capturing Value
When products successfully address an important and unsatisfied job, the value that they create often goes well beyond the traditional cost-plus-target-margin approach that many companies use to develop a pricing strategy. Deep understanding of jobs to be done positions a company to more comprehensively capture the value that an offering creates.
Consider a global upstream chemical manufacturer that produces latex compounds. The company traditionally sold its product to the pulp and paper industry by the ton, and positioned it as little more than a binder used to hold pulp together in the manufacture of office paper.
Careful study of the end-user market uncovered a key frustration point for customers using the paper in high-speed photocopiers: frequent paper jams and smudged ink. The company recognized that its latex technology could alter the paper’s texture, to facilitate smooth passage through photocopiers and improved ink retention.
This solution satisfied a much more valuable job than simply “binding paper pulp.” It directly affected the end-user experience, and gave the company the opportunity to command a premium for its paper. The company’s awareness of the job positioned it to grab a piece of the value that it created.
Defending Share
Once an idea begins to gain momentum, competitive response is inevitable. As Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, and Erik A. Roth describe in Seeing What’s Next (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), nimble competitors typically take advantage of an incumbent’s structural weaknesses and blind spots. The jobs-aware incumbent, however, need not forfeit its prized market.
One medical device company, which we advised, faced an attack from a competitor. This competitor tore a page out of the disruptive playbook to launch a “good enough” solution at radically lower price points. Of course, our client could have matched the offering. But it wondered whether there was a way to optimize its existing offerings, so that customers wouldn’t consider the competitor’s offering good enough.
The company aimed to understand the full range of jobs that a practitioner and his or her office needed to do. It learned that practitioners employing its device sought much more than clinical benefits. They also required (1) training on how to effectively use the device, (2) assistance in building market awareness of the device’s advantages over alternative treatment approaches, (3) tools allowing them to communicate the device’s functionality to patients, and (4) new mechanisms to help patients pay for the treatment.
By pulling these and other innovation levers, the company was able to more sharply differentiate itself from its competitors.
Revitalizing Growth
Even white-hot categories cool. The jobs-to-be-done model can restart growth by helping companies shake up commoditized markets, and by highlighting opportunities to revive even the most moribund of brands.
Shake up commoditized markets. Few words cause as visceral a reaction from executives as “commoditization.” Every executive can tell a horror story of how one of the company’s crown jewels found its differentiation dissipating and its margins crumbling. In these circumstances, plowing more money into innovation seems to make the problem worse. General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt put it well when he noted, “We’re all just a moment away from commodity hell.”
But what does commoditization mean, exactly? It’s that customers just don’t value further improvements along particular dimensions. Does that imply there’s no improvement that customers would value? Often, the answer is no.
Hill-Rom Inc., which sells beds to hospitals, is one example. Hospital beds would seem to have all the characteristics of a commoditized product. Yet between 1975 and 1990, the company grew its share of the hospital bed market from 30% to 90%, and doubled the frequency with which hospitals replaced beds with new ones.
Hill-Rom worked to understand the levers it could affect to improve its customers’ businesses. As a result, it learned that nurses—who account for a significant share of hospitals’ operating costs, and whose patient interactions strongly influence quality-of-care perceptions—were spending inordinate time on tasks unrelated to nursing. For instance, they were picking up what patients had dropped on the floor, and solving TV problems.
By fitting their beds with features and functions that obviated many non-nursing tasks, Hill-Rom differentiated them in ways that helped hospitals make more money. And hospitals readily paid premium prices to get those improvements. These insights didn’t come from segmenting markets by small, medium, and large hospitals; they came from understanding the job—the levers that drive hospitals’ profitability. (See the sidebar, “Jobs in B2B contexts.”)
Sidebar “Jobs in B2B Contexts.”
The jobs-to-be-done model applies whether you are selling to businesses or consumers.
Along one level: If you sell to businesses, the quest is easy. As the old saying goes, “The business of business is, after all, business.” Understand how the business is organized to make money, and help it overcome hurdles that inhibit its profit potential.
Along another level: Of course, any expert will tell you that selling to businesses is a complex task, because many items require approval or exist in complicated systems. To learn more about a potential business customer, make sure you closely grasp those complicated systems. Aim to understand the purchaser, the influencers, and the ultimate decision maker; each person in that network is likely to have distinct jobs he or she is trying to do.
As it turned out, there was tremendous room for differentiation and premium pricing in the hospital bed market. It just required taking a fresh perspective: identifying dimensions along which existing products weren’t good enough to do important jobs.
Revive moribund brands. Many companies find that the power of particular brands wanes over time. A powerhouse of a brand decreases in importance as core customers age and a new generation arises, without the close connection to it.
A jobs-to-be-done perspective can illuminate ways of reinvigorating the brand. Procter & Gamble (P&G) employed it several years ago, when it attempted to revive the Mr. Clean brand.
The company asked a simple and powerful question: When the brand was at its strongest, in the 1960s and 1970s, what was the real reason for consumers hiring Mr. Clean products? Its conclusion was that consumers wanted to magically clean the seemingly “uncleanable.” With that understanding, P&G began actively seeking circumstances in which consumers were frustrated by their inability to do so. It identified three of them:
1. My rogue child decided that our pristine white walls make an ideal blank canvas for an artistic vision. Mr. Clean Magic Eraser cleans these hard-to-clean surfaces—like magic.
2. I spend four hours a day in my car, and it gets dirty. I don’t have the time or the inclination to go to a professional car cleaner, and the soap and bucket doesn’t really cut it. Mr. Clean Auto Dry does this job.
3. I’d love to clean behind my toilet, in the back corner of the shower, and underneath the sink. But I’d also love to not kill my back. Mr. Clean Magic Reach Bathroom Explorer makes this problem much easier to solve. With that question, P&G was equipped to focus its innovation energy and help the brand return to its former prominence.
Sidebar "Sample Questions"
• What is the problem you’re facing, and why do you care about solving it?
• What is the process you use to solve that problem?
• What alternatives do you consider when going through this process?
• Why do you select a particular option?
• What do you like about the option?
• What don’t you like about the option?
• What frustrates you when you’re trying to solve this problem?
• What other people are involved in this process, and what is the nature of your interaction with them?
Finding the Job
The jobs-to-be-done model is highly intuitive and very understandable. Case studies in The Innovator’s Solution describe how many consumers hire (1) milkshakes to fill long and boring commutes, and (2) the BlackBerry to kill time productively. These ring true to most marketers. When it comes time to act on the model, however, many companies we’ve worked with find themselves stuck. The concepts that look so appealing in print become surprisingly difficult to implement.
The good news, in our experience, is that the jobs-to-be-done model doesn’t require using radical or new marketresearch techniques. The tried-and-true ones that companies use to conduct research can provide tremendous insight into important and unfulfilled jobs, if applied properly.
Two factors are critical to using the jobs-to-be-done model:
1. Act like an investigative reporter, using a variety of techniques to unearth and synthesize job clues. Focus groups, observational research, internal brainstorming, and expert interviews can be helpful for generating long lists of jobs. And quantitative research can assist with prioritization and trade-off decisions. “Finding the Right Job for Your Product”—a working note by Christensen, Anthony, Gerald Berstell, and Denise Nitterhouse—describes these and other approaches in more detail.
2. Ensure that market research questions change in ways that are consistent with the jobs-to-be-done model—which places the customer’s problem squarely in the center of the information equation. As mentioned, questions must focus on understanding problems instead of gaining reactions to proposed solutions. The sidebar, “Sample questions,” presents a few that we’ve found valuable.
The jobs-to-be-done model is straightforward, but it can dramatically change the way you think about new opportunities. It forces you to see the world from customers’ perspectives— and comprehend not just what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it.
Just as a well-designed manufacturing process can ruthlessly stamp out variation, starting with deep insight into the customer job improves the innovation process’ predictability. The biggest impediment to change can be existing mindsets. Commence altering these with simple starting points: Gather critical managers together, introduce the concepts, and get them to talk about the jobs for which customers hire company products. Or have them open their briefcases, pull out a product, and describe the jobs for which customers hire it. Such simple steps begin the process of transformation.
This article was published by American Marketing Assotiation in Marketing Management Journal, Mar/Apr2007, Vol. 16 Issue 2, p18-24
Scott D. Anthony, Joseph V. Sinfield
11.10.07 11:14
до друку
