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All over the world, people spend their days getting things done. Much of what they do is aimed at achieving a collection of short and long term goals that they see as related to their wellbeing. The many decisions they make throughout the day – which toothpaste to use, whether to drink coffee or tea, what product to buy for their business – are part of meeting those goals as defined by each person.

But what if people only know part of what they want? Or, more radically, what if they don’t really understand why they want what they want? While such a confusion at first glance seems like a recipe for an innovation disaster, it is precisely in this knowledge gap that there are opportunities for new growth. How can companies use this knowledge gap to win new customers or bring new products to market? How can identifying the known and unknown drivers of consumer behavior give businesses an edge in the marketplace? And if people themselves don’t know what they want or why they want it, how can anyone else find out?

This process of searching for growth opportunities is the result of 12 years of in-house research and experimentation building on further precedents. The basic premise is the intuitive, but not so obvious, idea that through the “why” of people’s actions you can uncover the reasons – emotional, psychological, and practical – that make people behave in certain ways, not others . Ultimately, people are just trying to get things done in their life, whether they are making a purchase for their own use, collaborating on a business-to-business transaction, or using a government service. You can use a wide variety of solutions to accomplish these tasks. Hence, it is wrong to focus attention on the solutions being used – as marketers usually do. It’s the jobs that really matter. Once you understand what people are trying to do, it will be easier to predict which products or services they will use and which will not.

While this is not the only requirement for successful innovation or growth, identifying the vacancy that current or prospective clients are trying to meet is central to any innovation strategy. It protects against the pursuit of phantom opportunities and establishes the innovation in intelligent data. The “Jobs To Do” approach creates a powerful method for creating breakthrough innovations time and time again.

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The Jobs to be Done framework is successful because it focuses innovators on the right questions rather than directing them to come up with solutions. This cannot be intuitive. After all, innumerable ingenious stories emphasize the moment of insight into problem solving. But it is actually problem elaboration that often leads to groundbreaking ideas. Organizations can waste thousands of hours and risk doing bad projects by missing the critical – and often underestimated – step of creating very clear and strictly defined problems.

Breakthroughs come from re-designing problems, rather than gradually improving a well-understood challenge. To help people see their challenges differently, we encourage them to look at the “why” of consumer behavior rather than just focus on the “what”. For example, parents can take their kids to a movie on a Saturday afternoon, but the underlying task is to keep the kids entertained. A film is just one way of doing this job. Job drivers – the underlying context that makes certain jobs more or less important – influence customers’ decisions on how to satisfy a job. In the movie example, the age of the children or the weather that day can make a difference in how happy the job of entertaining children is. Cinema’s real competition is not just other cinemas, but also playgrounds, arcades, and other distractions. While offering a discount on ticket prices or a better selection of snacks could help compete against cinema across town, these solutions ultimately represent a superficial way of thinking about the competition. A better way to win could consist of creating a small indoor playground or offering a space for contacts with dates after the end of a movie. By understanding the true motivators of behavior, a company can discover new markets and previously ignored innovation levers.

You know what your customers are buying, but do you know what they really want to do?

Contributed by Stephen Wunker to Branding Strategy Insider, excerpt from his book JOBS TO BE DONE: A Roadmap for Customer-Oriented Innovation

The Blake Project can help you create a better competitive future in the jobs to be done

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