Brand Innovation

Jobs to be Done is a hot concept. Companies as wide ranging as twitter, Nestlé, Clorox, and Cisco have been using the theory to double down on customer-centricity. Given that I co-authored one of leading books on the topic, this development is good news. However, I’m dismayed to see how people struggle with using the framework for market segmentation. They tend to over-simplistically bifurcate markets, define segments around jobs that are actually universally important, or frame the analysis from the wrong starting places (e.g., what people are buying today). There is a much better way.

In an interview with Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s former Chief Design Officer, he mentioned that Apple didn’t do consumer focus groups, market research, etc, explaining that Apple knew the future possibilities better than their consumers. This led me on to think about the famous quote from Henry Ford, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Nine of the ten most valuable companies in America can trace their greatness to reconceiving a market’s boundaries. From ExxonMobil to Apple to Wal-Mart, these firms expanded markets that others saw as static. How can companies in today’s economy – seemingly hemmed in on all sides by hyper-competitive markets – break into new ground?

Although customers may be reluctant to part with certain current approaches, they are consistently looking to alleviate pain points. Pain points are problems that inhibit a customer’s ability to get a job done. They are things that customers find inefficient, tedious, boring, or frustrating.

What are Amazon’s greatest innovations? Drones? Cloud computing? Echo and Alexa? These are impressive; some are even revolutionary. However, I believe Amazon’s greatest innovations are the ones that have changed the basics of competing to the point where they now sound mundane.