Profiling Your Customers with 'Jobs-to-be-done'

For companies looking to tailor your marketing messages directing to the right customer profiles, looking at using the "Job-to-be-done" template with ad-lib could be a potential idea for your next campaign.

Clayton Christensen, renowned Professor from Harvard, spoke about the "Job-to-be-done" framework. His classic milkshake case study is a great example to represent this framework. Additionally, Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) emphasized that we have to be obsessed with our customers, not competitors. Couple of years back, Alex Osterwalder (author of the popular 'Business Model Generation' book) came up with another book titled 'Value Proposition Design'. In his book, he has classified customer jobs into 4 different Categories, namely:

1. Functional Jobs; e.g. eat healthy as a consumer, write a report, help clients as a professional.
2. Social Jobs; e.g. look trendy as a consumer, be perceived as competent as a professional.
3. Personal or Emotional Jobs; e.g. seeking peace of mind regarding one’s investment as a consumer, achieving the feeling of job security at one’s workplace.
4. Supporting Jobs; (1) Buyer of Value (e.g. compare offers, deciding products, completing a purchase), (2) Co-creator of Value (e.g. posting product review & feedback, participate in designing a product / service), and (3) Transferrer of Value (e.g. canceling a subscription, disposing a product, transferring it to others, reselling it).

Hence, as Clay Christensen will ask, "Why do your customers 'hire' your product or services for?"

However, before we answer this question, let's look at who our customers are, or rather what roles do they play in the buying (or hiring) process. I've summarized the typical profiles of customers in the following diagram.

It will be easier to identify the "Job-to-be-done" if we are able to determine the profile(s) our customers are in the buying process.

In the case of Clay Christensen's example of the milkshake case study (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfGtw2C95Ms) the customer's profile will be that of an End User. My humbled opinion is shared in the following worksheet with the 4 Categories of Jobs (in Alex's 'Value Proposition Design' book) applied on the milkshake case to present a "Job-to-be-done" in a multi-dimensional perspective.

In the above diagram, I've also confronted the 4 Categories of Jobs with the 3 Types of Customer's Needs.

3 Types of Customer's Needs:

1. Tasks; the work they are trying to perform and complete.
2. Problems; the pain point(s) they are trying to resolve.
3. Needs; the needs or wants they are trying to satisfy.

Once you are able to determine each dimension (permutation) of the Jobs & the Needs, this will provide better clarity to the profile of your customer.

Next, depending on your customer's profile (in this case, End User), it will be easier to craft your marketing message targeting at the most annoying or desired "Jobs-to-be-done" of your customer. This could be done through the Ad-Lib exercise as follows.

Another way of writing could be:

"Our Milkshake keeps business professionals company during their drive to work, and provides a 'hassle-free' drinking method; hence, allowing them to reach their office on time and feeling satisfied, unlike a messy cheese burger."

There are couple of ways to expand the ad-lib once you get the hang of it.

With the above exercises with your team, you should be able to have a better understanding of your customers or potential customers, and be able to craft a tailored message(s) or campaign to 'touch' them emotionally.