Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) – A Marketer’s Perspective

Clayton Christensen, the late author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and former HBS professor, wrote the hugely popular Know Your Customer’s “Jobs to Be Done” in 2016.

While I love the focus that JTBD brings on the customer, here are a few things which bother me:

• Faulty assumptions:

The article assumes that the fundamental problem with innovation performance is managers basing decisions on correlation instead of causality.

I haven’t seen this as a dominant pattern in my two decades with CPG and Manufacturing industries. Managers have skin in the game, and there is a penalty for bad judgments and decisions.

"The focus on knowing more and more about customers—is taking firms in the wrong direction."

Knowing more about customers is a necessary if not sufficient condition for unearthing insights—the very heart of Marketing. In most cases, more is good.

• Examples used highlight classic marketing rather than the application of JTBD

The three examples – Condominiums, American Girl dolls, and SNHU online distance learning used to demonstrate the use of JTBD actually end up demonstrating classic marketing concepts - Consumer insights, Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning. The idea of JTBD seems to be a force fit.

• Nielsen’s breakthrough innovation report 2016 quoted in the article seems to attribute the success to JTBD

One of the criteria for inclusion in the report is that the innovation generated >= US $50 million in year one and 90% of first year sales in year two.

However it is a fact that no innovation succeeds without awareness and trial (assuming product fit), which needs strong marketing support ($$) and distribution.