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Jobs-To-Be-Done: How to Discover The Real Insights That Increase Sales

Here’s how a Harvard Professor helped McDonald’s increase milkshake sales by 400%. And how you can do the same:

Ozan Irturk
ILLUMINATION
5 min readMay 12, 2023

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Image by author, ©️ author assumes provenance and copyright

About 10 years ago, McDonald’s marketing team received an objective from their management.

Increase milkshake sales.

How hard could it be?

Especially for a sophisticated marketing team with an unlimited budget.

So they created a focus group that fit the milkshake buyer persona, based on data of millions of customers.

And made interviews with them to improve the milkshake.

Flavors, calories, size…

They asked about all the milkshake attributes to figure out what would make them buy more.

And they implemented the findings from the interviews.

Result?

No change in milkshake sales.

They did a few more experiments, but nothing worked.

So they gave up.

And decided to hire help from Harvard Business School Professor and business consultant Clayton Christensen.

Finding the job-being-done

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ILLUMINATION
ILLUMINATION

Published in ILLUMINATION

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Ozan Irturk
Ozan Irturk

Written by Ozan Irturk

Founder, Frontera. I help executives turn their businesses into great brands via strategy. Join 10,000+ executives: https://fronterabrands.com

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