Unifying Jobs To Be Done and Start With Why
“Feeling hungry? Eat our chocolate bar, it’s full of oats and will keep you from feeling hungry for hours” ❎
“We create products to make you perform at your best, by keeping hunger at bay during the day. Our current solution is our oat bar, try it today” ✅
In Simon Sinek’s book Start With Why, he advocates that your company should have a core belief, a Why. Any products you make are in service of that belief (you are not defined by your products, you are defined by your belief).
This is especially true in a world where markets change rapidly and the products need to change just as quickly to survive.
People value potential over current performance, so a company that implies it has potential to keep innovating will be valued above those that boast current performance.
One of my favourite examples of the JTBD spec is in the book Competing Against Luck; selling nappies to new markets.
The functional purpose of nappies is obvious (i.e. collection) and the company thought that if nappies sold in other countries why not expand into those that do not use them e.g. China? So they analysed the context of the JTBD (price families could afford for example), and made a product that fit (this is an example of glocalization).
They didn’t sell well. They asked people who did buy them why they bought them. The answer was interesting. They said that babies wearing nappies slept longer which meant they could spend more time with their partner (emotional aspect of the job). Also, sleeping longer meant better performance the next day (good performance is well regarded in society, so this forms the social part of the job).
They changed their marketing strategy by starting with why. They pushed the functional aspect of the nappy to the back of the sales pitch, and focused on the emotional and social aspects of the job.
They were no longer selling easier collection, they were selling more time with family, and more energy the next day.
This implies there is a hierarchy in the 3 aspects of the JTBD spec:
- Emotional
- Social
- Functional
Start With Why suggests organising your sales pitch as follows:
- Why you do what you do (emotional)
- How you do what you do (how you compare to others = social)
- What you do (functional)
Which complement the JTBD spec nicely.
