JTBD - How to put it into practice and what it's about

JTBD is an acronym that is all over the internet these days, although in fact the technique was invented quite a long time ago. So, what is it and when should it be used in business?

Usually, when a new term appears in an article, it is always common to introduce a definition first.

However, firstly we explain the acronym JTBD and the definition will appear later.

So, what is JTBD?

JTBD - Jobs To Be Done

It means that the product or service doesn’t actually match the customer's portraits or characteristics, but only the problems that the product solves. Technically, the customer hires your product to satisfy their needs

What is the advantage of JTBD over classic methods of creating a portrait of the target client?

Classical marketing likes to divide all people into young and old, women and men, conservatives and liberal. However, modern approaches require individual communication for each client (from a practical point of view, it is not even clear how you can use the information that the average age of your client is between 20 and 45).

Let me introduce Peter. He’s 35 years old man with an active lifestyle, has a degree in marketing and two dogs

Peter has just bought the Snickers. Did any of the above characteristics influence on his purchase? No, Peter didn't buy Snickers because he’s 35, has a degree in marketing and two dogs. Peter just satisfied his hunger.

In this way, the business understands that the person doesn't make a purchase on some circumstantial basis, but in order to solve their problem.

There are two JTBDs...

There are actually two JTBDs and few people know this, but I should mention it to avoid confusion later.

Ulwick and Christensen are two authors who came up with the concept at about the same time.

Their JTBD concepts differ primarily in their objectives

While Christenson used JTBD for disruptive innovations, Ulwick created the concept for sustaining innovations.

Without going into detail, the difference between disruptive and sustaining innovations is that the first is created to improve existing products and services, while the others aim to create new markets and reach new consumers

Personally, I don't see anything bad in the difference of approaches, because at our agency when working with JTBD, the objective defines the concept

How to find JTBD?

In terms of professional marketing, there are two main ways to find your jobs

1. Quantitative surveys
2. Data analysis and clustering

There are three main difficulties in quantitative surveys. Firstly, the rationality of surveys (they cost money, it may be better for you just to test product and draw conclusions from the data). Secondly, there are group selection factors (you will need between 160 and 5,000 respondents and the selection factors for these respondents is a separate story). The last one is the work on the questions you want to ask. And just to remind you, there is a separate science of sociology for this, so quantitative surveys are a kind of hassle.

On the other hand, we have data analysis and that is a different story. Data analysis is your bro, which is very easy to implement, cheap, with a real background and less likely to be changed (or it may be tracked). All you need is to collect as much cheque data as possible, find a programmer or contact our agency and cluster the data using the k-means method. Then, with the results, just draw conclusions, generate jobs and make strategic decisions based on them.

But how do you find JTBD if there is no money for quantitative surveys or data sets?

In that case, we take a shotgun, go out at night and start shooting in the dark. Or rather, there is a formula for JTBD, but I think you know the difference between taking job from a data set and writing it using a formula.

The formula looks like this:

Job = verb + object + context

Example:

Our product is hired to “Move the product creation and promotion tasks off dead center”, where Move is the verb; Creation and promotion tasks is the object; Dead center is the context. People often ask me why context matters. If you are asked whether you prefer a hammer or a saw, most people are likely to give a screw-loose sign. But if you set a specific task, such as sawing off a branch or hammering a nail, your customers will have no doubt about which to choose.

How to know that you have formulated the job correctly? We have created a checklist for this purpose. If all the points on this list are completed, the job is formulated correctly:

1. The job is described by a formula
2. The job describes a change for the better
3. The job describes not only the functional aspect, but also the social and emotional aspect
4. The job can be done in fundamentally different ways

I think the first two points are obvious, but questions may arise about the third and fourth. Social and emotional aspects are as important to the individual as the functional ones. This is the reason why people overpay for branded clothes, go to theme parks, etc. Often these aspects work even better than the funcional aspect, as the funcional aspect forces the user to compare your product with others in order to find the best solution for themselves. The fourth point may not be clear, but I would like to remind that you also need job to understand the competitors of your product, which may be products from a completely different niche. For example, for an orthopaedic mattress retailer, the competitors may be masseurs and the product, packaging and advertising campaign should be based on this.

How to implement JTBD?

Once we have formulated the JTBD, remains the simple task. Segment the results and use them to improve the product or create a new one. How do we segment? There are two methods of segmentation: by context and by jobs. Contextual is when we put people with the same problem in the same segment, but with different preferences for their solutions or the context of the problem itself. By work, this is when people have different problems, but want more or less the same outreach. Now we can start working on the product ;)