When starting to develop a new product, companies usually begin by dividing the market into different segments, and then make business decisions accordingly. However, customers don’t make purchasing decisions base on their segments, instead, they purchase things to satisfy the unfulfilled needs.
HBS professor Clayton Christensen proposed a concept called “job-to-be-done”. It states that rather than categorize the products and customers, companies should focuson planning what does customers want the products to do for them.
This concept works effectively to a restaurant which wants to improve its milkshakes sales. The reason why customers buy milkshake is not obvious. They are not hungry, they just want something to deal with the boring morning commute. The company found it out
by doing survey, and therefore, it modify the milkshake a little to meet the customers demand.
However, for a newly launched product, it is very difficult for the company to gather information about the job needs to be done by the products, as the data now existing are all organized in the way of segmentation, and everyone is fixating on this way. The real question here is: who is going to be the one to break the mold? It’s a lot harder to collect data like that and there is no existing data available. It is a decision that the companies need to make for the further success.