Source of image: vapartners.ca

Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen points out the wrong method of positioning the products for marketing purpose which many current businesses have used, and suggests a new way of segmenting their markets according to Jobs-to-be-done. Carmen Nobel tells about Christensen’s interesting insight into marketing in his post. This concept means rather than simply segmenting the markets by products or by demographics, companies should consider their products from customers’ point of view.

Milkshake is Christensen’s case example for this marketing concept. A fast-food restaurant wants to improve their milkshake sales and they find success when applying jobs-to-be-done segmentation method: by doing the research from existing customers and they figure out that how to improve their milkshake properly in order to satisfy the customers more. Then, the sales finally improve. However, It does not only apply to small businesses like Milkshake. I think jobs-to-be-done is a useful concept to every company when they are doing segmentation of company’s product and trying to improve the sales. It makes the company to consider more about customers’ interest, rather than just trying to improve the product itself, or just segmenting product into different demographics of customers and sell it without a clear understanding of their customer through study on their customers, and eventually fail. Applying this concept may help companies to avoid such failure. They may think as a customer of their products themselves, think about why the customers buy their products. Only when the customers get the satisfaction from their products, they are willing to pay.