Comparing Segmentation to Jobs to Be Done

Chapter 1: What is Experience Strategy?

I’m getting close to wrapping up chapter 1 of Experience Strategy. I’ve got three more sections to go. For the last two posts, I’ve been comparing (or perhaps better said, contrasting) traditional business strategy with experience strategy. These are fundamental topic areas and it’s okay if they don’t all make sense yet. I will be going deeper around each concept.

We’ve covered How with a Company Grow? and What Makes the Business Model Compelling? Now, let’s focus on what describes a customer’s need.

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What Describes a Customer’s Need?

In order to create scale, companies must look at aggregated customer needs. Even with the powerful customization capabilities that many technologies now provide, companies still require a way of identifying where the greatest opportunity lies. And so we all rely on statistical data to tell us the size of customer needs.

There are a lot of opinions about what constitutes a scalable need. The most prominent being that certain people are like-minded, and therefore have common needs. So, if you can identify the group of like-minded people, either through demographic data or psychographic data and ask them if they have a common need, you can scale your solution around that group. This is what most people call segmentation.

Let’s contrast segmentation with a different paradigm: jobs to be done.

Comparing Segmentation to Jobs to Be Done

Business strategy today builds on the fundamental premise of marketing: the way to understand the customer need is to find a need that arises among a group of like-minded individuals. These like-minded individuals are the ‘who’ the company should focus on. And since the 1960s, the idea that you must know the ‘who’ to understand the need has driven company strategies. To identify customers, companies often employ segmentation, a process of dividing the company’s target market into groups of potential customers based on attributes. Historically the easiest data to collect on customers was demographic data: gender, location, marital status, number of children, and attitudes toward life. Segmentation by demographics has long been the norm. Take, for example, Procter & Gamble. For decades, the consumer goods company almost always started with demographic-first data. For example, the target audience was a segment of the population that was female, married, over thirty, with a job and a busy schedule. She might have some unique attitudes or beliefs, but it was her demographics that helped the company size the need opportunity.   

Experience strategy starts from a fundamentally different place. The first question the experience strategist asks is “what is the need?” Understanding ‘what’ comes before understanding ‘who’. Identifying the need starts with three questions:

1.     What is the need?

2.     What are the situations in which the need arises?

3.     Are customers willing to hire the company to fulfill the need?

Each question helps the company understand the size of the opportunity for the company. A successful experience strategist wants to understand that job or set of jobs to be done because only then can they determine whether they can turn it into a viable value proposition for the customer. Many companies who use Job to be Done (JTBD) analysis to identify opportunities never employ segmentation to size the need opportunity. They may, like Apple, use segmentation for messaging, but they understand that the ‘what’ is more important than the ‘who.’

By starting with the ‘what’ instead of the ‘who’ innovators can focus on the factors that matter to most people. Rarely are those factors their gender, age, income, home location, or other demographic data. More often, those factors include the amount of time they have to spend, their learning curve, the importance of the job to the moment, and the value that they get from a solution to the challenge.  Migraine sufferers have a lot in common because they have a similar job to be done, not because who they are.

As shown earlier, the situation creates the market. Technology makes the market instant and always present. The job to be done is the need that arises from the situation or across multiple situations. Using our earlier examples, we see something like this occur:

In chapter four, I will go deeper into Jobs to be Done. As an experience strategist it’s your job to understand the whole job the customer wants to get done. Here’s the forthcoming chapter outline.

1. Introduction

   1. The innovator focuses on the job to be done. The experience strategist focuses on the whole job the customer wants done.

   2. Why we focus on jobs to be done instead of needs.

2. A taxonomy for jobs to be done

   1. Focus on the what, not the who

   2. Functional, emotional, social, aspirational, and systemic

   3. Big jobs and little jobs

   4. How people are pre-disposed to certain JTBD

3. How intelligent solutions change what we want from JTBD

   1. Queuing and dashboards

   2. A much larger number of jobs to get done

4. What happens if the company cannot do the whole job?

   1. Example: healthcare companies are not allowed to do certain parts of healthcare (pharma can’t provide diagnosis)

   2. Partnerships are the answer

   3. In the future, partnerships are far more important. Most companies won’t be able to do the whole job. But they will need to see the whole job.

5. What happens when business channels don’t support the whole job?

   1. People stop using the channel

   2. Don’t design tools that can’t get the job done

6. Identifying, prioritizing, and gathering requirements

   1. Identifying big and small JTBDs.

   2. Prioritizing which JTBD should be The Big Job

   3. Gathering requirements for solutions in the intelligent era

7. New Strategy Skill: Whole Job Planner

   1. Strategists need to provide guidance on when the company should do the whole job and when they should partner

   2. Skill includes the ability to dashboard new opportunities to pursue

8. Closing

9. Reflection Activity

   Click here for book outline with links to posts

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