Marketing Malpractice
Or “Why People Don’t Buy Your Stuff”
This week’s selection is Marketing Malpractice by Clayton Christensen
The Gist
The customers’ point of view is simple: they are just trying to get things done. “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want to buy a quarter inch hole… When people find themselves needing to get a job done, they essentially hire products to do that job for them.” A product manager’s goal then is to find what jobs customers are trying to get done and create products that can be hired to fulfill those jobs.
The Gem
The anecdote about how Christensen’s firm used Jobs-To-Be-Done to improve milkshake sales is a prime example of using the effective research methods to develop a novel theory of value.
Why I Chose This
Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) = Theory of Value. Christensen and Zenger are riffing on the same idea, the only difference is in the way the authors talk about it — vocabulary and scale.
- Christensen examines value creation within the scope of a single-purpose JTBD where 1 JTBD = 1 product/brand.
- Zenger examines value within the scope of a multi-purpose JTBD where 1 JTBD = 1 strategy that yields a product ecosystem all organized within related products and brands.
P&G has perfected the Christensenian approach to theory of value: create and manage a portfolio single-purpose brands, each based on its own JTBD generated in a centralized R&D function. Disney on the other hand follows the Zengerian approach: orient around a master JTBD (humans love a good story) that is accessible through multiple mediums: movies, TV, radio, music, print, theme parks, and toys.
