How to Better Understand What Customers Truly Want From You

Learn more about the much-needed customer "jobs to be done" marketing strategy.

photo by Clem Onojeghuo / Unsplash

Note: “Jobs to Be Done” is one of the frameworks featured in Growth Marketing SuperBoost.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this article on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

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Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”¹

Innovation expert Clayton Christensen added, “People buy products and services to get a job done.”

Historically, the primary cause of failed products and services is a misalignment with customer needs or wants. This is unsurprising, since 95 percent of teams do not agree on what a customer “need” or “want” even is.²

Using the “Jobs to Be Done” framework, you can truly understand the “jobs” your customers “hire” your product or service to do for them, as well as the metrics your customers use to measure the success of this “hired job.”

The power of this framework is that it provides an anchor point from “where” a business or organization can create additional value (outside of the value of their product or service) by speaking the true language of your customers while competitors are not, thereby increasing your pricing power and customer lifetime value, decreasing churn and the need for price promotions, and other vital impacts.

The “Jobs to Be Done” framework also supports what we at the Growth Marketing Institute call “making the story bigger” — or getting out of the cycle of just promoting your products or services. As branding experts Al Ries and Laura Ries wrote, “A leading brand should promote the category, not the brand.” By “aggressively promoting the category,” they added, a business or organization creates “both a powerful brand and a rapidly escalating market.”³

“Making the story bigger” is challenging for many businesses or organizations, not least because operators think that their products or services are effectively God’s gift to mankind. Therefore, operators often think that their brand’s messaging should be about how amazing these products or services are. This is understandable, since operators spend tons of time and energy developing their products or services, oftentimes producing “tunnel vision.”

However, it is crucial to understand that customers are not operators. They are busy, distracted, fickle, and selfish. This is where the “Jobs to Be Done” framework comes into play, the premise of which is that people do not care about your products or services; they care about their needs. Your products or services are a means to a customer’s end. As Donald Miller, the CEO of StoryBrand, describes it: “The customer is the hero, not your brand.”⁴

A “Job to Be Done” is defined as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance. Progress is important because it represents movement toward an objective, goal, or aspiration. Jobs are an ongoing struggle for progress, not strictly tasks to be completed.

It can be helpful to think of this progress as a combination of what the customer wants and why they want it. Simultaneously, the circumstance is essential to defining the “job” (and finding a solution for it) because the exact kind of progress desired always depends on customers’ circumstances.

“The key thing to remember,” wrote brand strategist Clay Ostrom, “is that we don’t create or invent Jobs for our customers. Instead, we discover them by listening to the struggles of real people with real problems. Through interviews, surveys, and simply talking with your target audience you can learn what your customers’ Jobs are and how they think about and describe them.”⁵

Businesses and organizations that do not understand their customers’ core “jobs” play a minimal part in people’s lives, if at all. Additionally, the world is very cluttered, with an overload of marketing and advertising from TV, digital, et cetera competing for our attention.

Because we simply do not have the time or resources to consider every option, our brains are more likely to “satisfice” and choose a brand that “will do” rather than one that is necessarily “the best,” according to Byron Sharp in his book, How Brands Grow.

As a result, most brand loyalty is passive rather than active. And customers actively reject brands when they find them to be too complex or difficult to evaluate, and they prefer to stick with what they know works for their “Jobs to Be Done.”

Thus, as advertising guru David Ogilvy put it, businesses and organizations are most effective at branding when they present it in terms of the customers’ “self-interest.”⁶

Before a business or organization can define its relevant customers’ needs or wants, it must first define all of its customers, according to three categories:

1. The Job Executor: This is the person(s) using the product or service to get the “core functional job done” (More on this below.)

2. The Support Team: This is the person(s) involved in enabling the product or service to produce the desired outcome(s) of the job. (In many cases, this person will be the job executor.)

3. The Buyer: This is the person responsible for making the transactional decision, as well as the transaction itself.

The “Jobs to Be Done” framework also includes the types of “jobs” that the job executor, the support team, and the buyer are aiming to “hire,”⁷ such as:

1. The Core Functional Job: This is defined as the overarching “job” that the job executor is trying to get done in specific situations. Think: “I buy and/or use this product/service so that I can be/feel/do/become/eliminate/minimize/maximize/avoid/prolong…”

2. Related Jobs: These are additional, secondary functional jobs that the job executor is trying to get done either before, during, or following the execution of the core job. With an understanding of these related jobs, and which, if any, are underserved, a business or organization can devise solutions that help its customers get multiple jobs done, making its product or service appear more valuable (and thus increasing, for example, your pricing power and lifetime customer value).

3. Emotional Jobs: These are what the job executor wants to be perceived or feel when executing the core functional job. Social jobs are also included in this categorization. These inputs are valuable when it comes to creating a value proposition that incorporates both functional and emotional components, which strongly connect with customers and drive up perceived value of your product or service.

4. Support Team Jobs: The support team is trying to execute a number of jobs throughout the product/service lifecycle — all impacting the customer experience.

5. The Purchase Decision Job: This is the job that the purchase decision-maker executes using a financial lens to try to decide which product or service to buy. Here we want to know what financial and/or performance metrics are used to make the purchase decision. These metrics are known as “financial desired outcomes.”

Next, you want to write a desired outcome statement for each type of job, as well as a desired outcome statement for each stage of the product/service lifecycle.

There’s more where this came from at the Growth Marketing Institute.

1. “What Customers Want from Your Products.” Harvard Business School.

2. “Jobs-to-be-Done: A Framework for Customer Needs.” jobs-to-be-done.com

3. Ries, Al and Ries, Laura. “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.” Harper Business, 2002.

4. Miller, Donald. “Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen.” HarperCollins Leadership, 2017.

5. “Learn What Your Customers Want Using Jobs to Be Done.” Map & Fire.

6. Ogilvy, David. “Ogilvy on Advertising.” Crown, 1983.

7. “Jobs-to-be-Done: A Framework for Customer Needs.” jobs-to-be-done.com