In the article posted by Harvard Business School, Clay Christensen’s Milkshake Marketing theory is explained. To sum it up in a few words, it is the idea that a product or service should be marketed depending on the job that future consumers will hire it to fulfill. This theory is somewhat contradictory to the usual idea of marketing towards the targeted segment, and I personally believe it to be viable. When I go to Starbucks before my 3:00pm class, I don’t just buy my coffee because I am a pretentious UBC student, I buy it because it does the job of keeping me awake during Math and Econ, and believe me, there are many other students doing the same. This insight creates a market for Starbucks, to market to those students feeling drowsy in the afternoon and need a pick-me-up so they don’t end up failing their first university midterm.

Source: http://www.theslenderstudent.com/tag/starbucks/

Even though I do find truth to it, I do believe there are room for errors such as it is only useful when past data is available. All in all,  “Milkshake Marketing” is a perfectly sound idea, but is not completely superior to the standard targeted segmentation approach.

reference: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html