Jobs-to-be-done hunting

The problem

A large insurance company wanted to develop a new enterprise positioning to accelerate growth—especially in the face of competitors just pulling ahead in the race for consumer attention.

The process

To gain inspiration for a brand positioning that would truly mean something to consumers, we started with Jobs-to-be-done.

For the uninitiated—Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) methodology is based in the idea of finding consumers’ ENERGY for progress in their lives. My favorite example to use when explaining JTBD is the American Girl example: imagine American Girl were expanding, and they hired me to find out how they might expand their product or brand experience in a way meaningful to consumers. After completing the methodology—and let’s say that our target audience is comprised of mothers with middle-school age daughters—I might say that a top Job-to-be-done is something like “When my daughter has soccer or dance practice every single day, help me make the most of a free afternoon so I can know I have a real place in her life.” It’s broadly “help me spend time with my daughter!” but firmly situated in a real time and space, so you can feel the urgency, the empathy, the ENERGY of what consumers are trying to do in their life. It’s what mothers are “hiring” American Girl products and services to do in their lives. So, when American Girl is looking to open up and expand—rather than dealing in traditional product lines, like What doll should we make next to reach a new audience?, we can deal in JTBD, like How might we create new ways for mothers to spend with their daughters (on a random free afternoon, for some real quality time)? The aperture for growth opens up—to experiences like the American Girl Café and beyond.

So to understand audience needs—to understand where their energy for progress in their life is that an insurance company might be able to key into — we started a JTBD hunt.

Working with a moderator familiar with JTBD methodology, the team crafted “drill sites” with the client—areas of interest to dig into, like enrolling in insurance for the first time because of a life event. Screener and discussion guide complete, we invited the client to listen in to the interview sessions, and took part in light, workshop-like debrief sessions after each interview to identify that participant’s top motivations, struggles, and surprises. We then drafted multiple JTBD statements for each participant, in the format:

When I am… Help me… So I can…

After all 16 sessions were complete, I and the team went back to review the JTBD statements we’d drafted. We honed them based on the motivations, struggles, and surprises we’d identified, as well as our ongoing hypotheses about what big JTBD clusters might be emerging. We then brainstormed JTBD clusters—groupings of the individual JTBD statements we’d formulated. An example JTBD statement might be “When I am stuck in the middle of the road post-accident with cars going on either side of me, help me find a representative who treats me fairly and really listens to me, so I can feel like my insurance company cares about me” — and that statement might fall under the TRUST cluster, full of other statements about helping them trust that their insurer has their back so they can feel taken care of in their worst-nightmare moments.

It’s a visceral, deeply empathetic process of gleaning customer insight—listening specifically for where they have the most ENERGY and desire for progress in their lives.

We gathered these 16 JTBD statements into four clusters to share with the client as part of our audience insight. Alongside internal truths, market landscape, and cultural shifts research, this audience insight guided our creation and development of six potential enterprise positionings.

We received very positive feedback from the client, who has since become a major client of the firm to bring the tested and selected positioning all the way to fruition.

My contribution: I facilitated many of the interview debrief sessions, leading our client discussion to identify motivations, struggles, and surprises, and to formulate initial JTBD statements. I then with my peer on the team honed all the JTBD statements after the interviews were over. We also together came up with the four JTBD clusters and assembled all the materials to tell the participants’ stories. With my immersion in the JTBD customer research, I also played a significant role ideating and crafting the six positioning territories.

Reflection: It’s so important to think about where the ENERGY is for consumers during exploratory research. That energy is where they’re trying to make progress in their lives—keying into that can make a company’s actions actually meaningful to consumers. If we can tap into that energy, we have a really powerful brand, product, feature, messag, ad—whatever it is—on our hands.