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You know what your customers are buying, but do you know what they really want to do? Peter Drucker, legend of corporate governance, wrote over 50 years ago: “The customer rarely buys what the company believes it sells.” More recently, Harvard's Clayton Christensen has popularized the concept of people trying to get jobs done , and often a very wide range of products and services – and they do nothing – compete for these jobs. If you don't understand your real competition, how can you beat them?

To answer the questions that are essential for business success, brand strategy experts from The Blake Project, together with customer motivation experts from Jobs To Be Done, developed the Jobs To Be Done workshop and developed a proven way of systematically uncovering the drivers of customer behavior.

The Job To Be Done workshop is offered in one- and two-day versions and works step by step with a Jobs Atlas approach in order to develop a holistic view of competition and opportunities. The focus is on action learning – learning by doing – and the results are both a differentiated understanding of customers and ideas on how they can be better served. The components include:

• The difference between jobs and requirements and how to understand what leads to behavior
• The types of drivers that cause people to prioritize different jobs at different times
• How to evaluate pain points and travel maps in the right context and understand not just what people are doing but why they are doing it
• Success criteria that customers use to evaluate new solutions
• In this way you avoid obstacles when introducing new offers
• Understand the value your brand can create by targeting the right jobs for the right customers on the right occasions

The "To Do" workshop will be greatly facilitated and underpinned by examples of good practice and interactive exercises. The design is usually an offsite or video conference with 6 to 20 people. Participants typically come from brand marketing, product management, research and development, and general management. The results of the Blake Project's Jobs to be Done workshops have proven critical for startup, emerging, regional, national, global B2C and B2B brands to:

• New perspective on what motivates customers
• Opportunities to gain new ways of understanding customers
• Unique approaches to brand strategy
• A new take on competitive positioning
• Ideas on how to capitalize on opportunities created through insight

Many companies try to shape the future by looking back. They focus on what they are already selling or doing and how their customers are currently behaving. When you focus on jobs, you look deeper – at what really drives behavior. This perspective can completely transform the strategic approach and ensure that ideas are more related to the real motivations of customers than to what they are doing today. With a job approach, you can win both now and in the future.

The catalyst for a better competitive future

Focusing on things to do, rather than previous customer buying behavior, allows you to define a broader range of solutions with more opportunities for competitive advantage and / or innovation. Here's a summary of the key points and lens we'll be using in the Jobs To Do workshop.

Job driver:

• Job drivers are the underlying factors that make certain jobs more or less important to different types of consumers.
• Job drivers can be revealed based on three broad categories: attitudes, background, and circumstances.
• Jobs and job drivers together make up customer segments – customer groups that buy and behave in similar ways.
• Rather than developing fully loaded, unified products, new offerings should be targeted towards specific customer segments by focusing on the tasks that are important to those specific consumers.

Current approaches:

• The product buyer is just one of several stakeholders who may need to be happy with your new offering. Consider if there is an end user or some other key decision maker who needs to be satisfied.
• Current approaches are the activities that collectively represent the way a customer does something. Pain points – a breeding ground for innovation – are the areas of difficulty, frustration, or inefficiency along the way.
• Since context can affect what jobs are in play, you should ask about specific occasions (not just average behavior) to get as detailed as possible.
• Consumers are often locked into their current approaches. So think carefully about how quickly you can expect consumers to change their behavior if your solution calls for such a change.

Success:

• Success criteria are not jobs, but indicators of whether a job has been completed.
• The success of a new product often requires looking for specific occasions and contexts that are most important to the customer.
• First, try to understand what customers want more, what they want less, and where to strike a balance.
• Your new solution may ultimately require tradeoffs. It is perfectly acceptable to forego features that are important to a limited number of customers, as long as you excel in the dimensions that are most important to your target customer segments.

Obstacles:

• There are two types of barriers: barriers to adoption and barriers to use.
• Barriers to adoption are hurdles that limit a consumer's willingness to buy.
• Barriers to adoption can be reduced by making it easier for people to learn about and try out your new offering.
• Barriers to use are hurdles that stand in the way of success and limit a customer's likelihood of continuing to use a product, purchasing add-ons, or upgrading to newer versions.
• Continuously attracting a new customer base is often too costly to be sustainable. Therefore, it is important to remove barriers to use so that first-time buyers become repeat buyers.

Value:

• To understand how much money is at stake in terms of a new solution, markets need to be shaped by jobs, not products.
• A value-based pricing strategy that takes into account the unique or emotional tasks your offering performs can help you better understand how expensive your solution can and should be.
• Your solution doesn't just have to think about the value you bring to the customer and other key stakeholders, it also needs to add value to the company. Think about whether you can capture the value sustainably with your model.

Competition:

• In addition to your traditional or direct competitors, your offer also competes with other offers that perform the same tasks.
• Since consumers are looking outside of your product category to get their jobs done, you should familiarize yourself with the full range of direct and indirect competitors and position your products accordingly.
• By using a job-based lens, your wider view can also illuminate more growth paths.
• Non-consumption areas – the areas your competitors are not currently playing in – can offer significant potential, but they also carry some risk.
• Think of both traditional and non-traditional competitors in terms of their relative advantages, flexibility, and risks.

Please send us an email to learn more about how this workshop can help your offer secure a place in the future.

Brand Strategy Insider is a service from The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in brand research, brand strategy, brand growth and branding