Jobs to Be Done

From “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure” by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall (Harvard Business Review, December 2005). The sentence opens the article’s prescriptive section, immediately after a critique of segmentation by product category and demographics. The article credits Theodore Levitt as the precedent: “The structure of a market, seen from the customers’ point of view, is very simple: They just need to get things done, as Ted Levitt said.” Christensen’s reformulation makes the metaphor of hiring explicit. The framework was developed at book length in Competing Against Luck (Christensen, Hall, Dillon, and Duncan, HarperBusiness, 2016).

Christensen’s running example was a fast-food chain whose milkshake sales did not respond to improvements along the obvious dimensions of flavor, thickness, and price. The team’s reframe was to ask not who bought the milkshakes but what job a milkshake was being hired to do. The answer for the morning shift was that the shake filled a long, boring commute and held off mid-morning hunger; the real competitors were bananas, boredom, and bagels. The improvement that worked was making the shake thicker so it lasted longer through a straw. That change makes no sense as a “better milkshake” and obvious sense as a “better commute companion.”

The thesis runs against demographic segmentation. Who buys this? sorts customers by who they are. What job is being hired for? sorts them by what they are trying to make progress on. As the article puts it, “the job, not the customer, is the fundamental unit of analysis.” The two sorts produce different groupings: two customers with identical demographics hire different products for different jobs; one CEO and one teenager can hire the same product for the same job. The shift in unit of analysis is the whole move; the milkshake example became canonical because the obvious competitors were so wrong.