When McDonald’s looked to increase milkshake sales, they considered the usual suspects; offering more flavours and different sizes. But that didn’t work.
Traditional customer research might discover that “I’d like a milkshake” really means “I want something filling to eat”. Jobs to be Done (JTBD) goes a layer deeper and reveals that customers actually wanted something to keep them engaged on a long commute to work.
So, instead of adding different flavours, the McDonald’s team made milkshakes thicker. Once they put in strategies to support the customer’s Job to be Done, (to reduce boredom on a commute), sales of milkshakes increased sevenfold. You can read the transcript where Clayton Christensen discusses the McDonald's case study in detail on HBR's IdeaCast podcast.
The power of understanding customer motivations beyond demographics
Today, we can gather more data about our target customers than ever before. But how useful is this data to marketers and business owners? If we are shaping products and developing strategy, demographic and psychodemographic data has its place, but it’s not the whole story.
In 1990, Tony Ulwick hypothesised that companies can unlock innovation and growth by understanding that customers buy a product or service to get a “job” done. If it does the job well, we hire it again. If it misses the mark, we look for an alternative to help us solve our problem.
It wasn’t until 2010 that people really started to pay attention to the Jobs to be Done framework. Johnson & Johnson attributed winning an Edison Award to the insights learned from their JTBD research, and the rest is history. Now, it’s applied in marketing, product, and management strategy the world over — in industries from SaaS to heavy machinery.
The Jobs to be Done framework helps B2B professionals like us to better understand customers, create a shared view of priorities, and enable a laser-focus on what drives the most results within our business.
In the resources below, we take you through the fundamentals of the Jobs to be Done framework and how crafting effective JTBD statements helps New Zealand companies like Tradify and Lumen achieve growth, alignment, and effectiveness.
