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In this edition:

• Column: What Is Your Product Hired To Do?

• Inspiration: The Last Barf Bag

• FREE White Paper: The Customer Acquisition Codex

Column: What Is Your Product Hired To Do?

When I first started in marketing I used to see this acronym in every brand strategy deck: JTBD.

Jobs To Be Done is a great framework to think through when we evaluate why people buy our products and services.

In simple terms, a JTBD is the job that someone hires your product to do.

Sounds odd to think about our products in this way, but when we put our market orientation goggles on we quickly realize that this isn’t a far fetched concept.

The Job Of A Milkshake

Years ago, McDonald’s came out with their first milkshake offering.

All category studies were pointing in the direction that this innovation would be a massive success, so they were quite confident with the launch.

So, they would invite milkshake drinkers into their offices to take part in focus groups and provide feedback on how to make their product better. However, with each improvement, the impact on sales was quite negligible.

And so they decided to hire the great Harvard professor Clay Christensen to take a look at what was happening.

His team applied to JTBD framework to understand why were people “hiring” milkshakes in their lives. What job exactly were milkshakes doing for customers?

As they conducted their ethnographic studies watching people coming and going from McDonald’s stores, they noticed that just about half of milkshakes were being sold before 8:30AM, it was the only thing they bought, they did not consume it in-store, and they were always alone.

As they asked these people what they were “hiring” their milkshakes for, they got a consistent eye-popping answer: they all had a long and boring drive ahead of them and needed something to stay engaged so they wouldn’t fall asleep on the road.

But there was more. The golden nugget of insight was: when they first bought these milkshakes they weren’t hungry yet, but they knew they would be hungry at around 10 o’clock. Meaning, they needed a drink that wouldn’t lose its flavour, consistency and temperature too fast so it lasted the long drive until they were ready to eat something.

When asked what alternatives they hired to do this exact same job, a few folks said a banana — but that it didn’t do the job well enough because they were still hungry after eating it —, whereas other said they hired a donut, which had a similar issue — one just wasn’t enough.

And as it turns out, cars have cupholders, too.

So, the job that the milkshake was hired to do was much more specific than originally thought of. And that the milkshake market was much bigger than the total number of milkshakes sold across the nation.

Because what they learned was that milkshakes didn’t just compete with other milkshakes — from the customer’s point of view milkshakes also competed against bananas, donuts, bagels, coffee, Sneakers bars, and other filling foods.

This one single job accounted for about half of all sales that McDonald’s was making off of its milkshakes. The other half was a completely different job later in the day, when a parent needed a “device” to put them and their kid on the same level to show that they cared about what they had to say.

So, the morning milkshake’s JTBD was about fulfilling hunger on a long drive to work, whereas the the night milkshake’s JTBD was about creating connection with their kids.

Using JTBDs For Product Improvement And Innovation

Now knowing why people hired milkshakes put McDonald’s marketer’s in a vey different playing field.

Understanding that people hired milkshakes for a long drive in the morning meant that now they could move them to the front of the counter, give them a swipe card to quickly grab and go, and make it thicker so it would take longer to melt.

Suddenly, the product improvements were centered around the job that the product was doing for customers, and not just around taste, flavour options or other less significant variables.

The beauty of this framework is that it involves a series of fundamental marketing concepts:

• Market orientation: what do customers truly care about when buying your product?

• Category Entry Points: what are the cues that category buyers use to access their memories when faced with a buying situation?

• Ethnography: what qualitative insights can you gain from talking to your customers one-on-one before testing it with a statistically representative sample?

• Behavioural segmentation: how do customers make buying decisions and what attitudes do they hold about the world?

• Benefits ladder: what are the features and benefits that customers truly care about when it comes to your product, and what emotions its consumption conveys?

This wide ranging understanding of what drives purchase is a well of insights to tighten up the screws of your product or service offerings and make it more relevantly better for your customers.

What Do People Hire Your Product For?

The crux of this concept is understanding the context in which your product or service is being used for.

When this is paired with the attitudes your customers hold — such as, “I like to eat chips while watching the football game” — you have a fertile ground for product innovation, brand partnerships, and advertising ideas.

The best way to uncover your JTBDs is by going out into the field and observing and talking to customers.

Then taking those insights and applying them to a quantitative survey to validate the magnitude of your findings.

You just might find out that your competitors are not exactly who you think they are, and that you may be focusing your R&D and advertising efforts on the wrong things.

And that’s exactly where exponential growth can be unlocked.

Inspiration: Dramamine’s “The Last Barf Bag”

When people think of advertising they typically think of Pepsi, Coke, Apple, Nike, and other sexy brands.

So when Dramamine, the highly effective nausea medication that has been waging war on barf bags for years, won a Grand Prix in Cannes this year, everyone took notice.

What I love about this campaign is how took a super weird insight — nausea medications are eradicating barf bags — and went on a completely unexpected direction with it.

And apparently there are barf bag collectors who said they could not find good barf bags anymore because the medications have gotten so good at treating nausea.

Until now. Dramamine launched a documentary, put on an exposition of barf bags, and sold its product alongside beautifully decorated barf bags online.

It’s the type of stuff that only ad people could think of, and the results speak for themselves.

This charming campaign generated over 650MM impressions, a +23% increase in brand engagement, and in turn a +26% increase in Dramamine sales

Barfo. I mean, bravo.

FREE White Paper: The Customer Acquisition Codex

A few weeks ago I've had the pleasure to be on a customer acquisition panel with some of the great marketing minds in Calgary (Alex Paisley, David MacLean, and Michael Gaudet) with the Calgary Marketing Association, led by the great Marc Binkley.

The WJ Agency team and I prepared a Customer Acquisition "Codex" on some of the key concepts we believe to be imperative in understanding this hotly debated topic.

💡 The 95-5 Rule

💡 The Strategic Planning Process

💡 The Difference Between B2C and B2B

💡 Brand Building vs Performance Marketing

💡 And much more

If you're interested in getting a copy, drop a comment in this post and I’ll LinkedIn DM you a copy! (Depending on your LinkedIn settings, you might need to ‘follow’ me first so I can DM you).

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 🍻 Come by the WJ office for a brew

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • Getting To The Insight

  • Pick Your Distribution Channels Wisely

  • How To Properly Assess Distinctive Brand Assets

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.