Jobs to Be Done: The Positioning Framework Brands Keep Ignoring

Jobs to Be Done is a framework for understanding why customers buy, not just what they buy. Developed through the work of Clayton Christensen and his colleagues at Harvard Business School, it argues that customers don’t buy products or services because of who they are demographically. They hire them to get a specific job done.

That reframe sounds simple. In practice, it changes everything about how you position a brand, write a value proposition, and decide where to compete.

Why Demographic Segmentation Keeps Failing Strategists

I spent years watching client briefs arrive with audience definitions that read something like: “ABC1 adults, 35-54, homeowners, household income above £60k, interested in travel and lifestyle.” The assumption was that shared demographics meant shared motivations. It rarely did.

Two people with identical profiles will buy completely different things, from completely different brands, for completely different reasons. One is renovating a house and needs a reliable contractor. The other is booking a last-minute city break because they’ve had a brutal quarter. The demographic data tells you nothing useful about either decision.

This is the core problem that Jobs to Be Done was designed to solve. Instead of asking “who is our customer?” it asks “what situation is the customer in, and what are they trying to accomplish?” That shift in question produces dramatically different answers, and dramatically better positioning.

If you want to understand how positioning fits into a broader brand strategy, the full picture is covered in the Brand Positioning and Archetypes hub, which pulls together the frameworks and decisions that make brand strategy usable in practice.

What “Hiring a Product” Actually Means

The metaphor at the centre of JTBD is that customers hire products and services to do jobs for them. When the job is done well, they keep hiring the same solution. When it isn’t, they fire it and find something else.

Christensen’s most cited illustration is the milkshake. A fast food chain was trying to increase milkshake sales. They ran the standard research, improved the product based on customer feedback, and sales stayed flat. When researchers observed actual customer behaviour, they found that most milkshakes were purchased in the morning, by commuters, who drank them alone in the car during a long drive to work. The job wasn’t “enjoy a treat.” It was “give me something to do with my hand, keep me full until lunch, and make my commute feel less empty.” The milkshake was competing with bananas, bagels, and boredom, not with other desserts.

That’s the level of specificity JTBD demands. Not “our customer wants a healthy snack.” But “our customer is in a car at 7:45am with one free hand, 40 minutes of motorway ahead of them, and a meeting they’re already anxious about.”

When you get that specific, the positioning question becomes much clearer: what does our brand offer that fits this exact situation better than anything else the customer could hire?

The Three Dimensions of Every Job

Jobs are never purely functional. Every job a customer hires a product to do has three layers, and brands that only address the functional layer leave significant positioning space on the table.

The functional job is the practical task: get from A to B, send a document, make dinner faster. This is where most product development and most messaging lives. It’s necessary, but it’s rarely sufficient for differentiation, because functional parity is common in mature categories.

The emotional job is how the customer wants to feel, or stop feeling, as a result of using the product. A project management tool doesn’t just organise tasks. It reduces the anxiety of not knowing what’s happening across a team. A premium gym membership doesn’t just provide equipment. It gives the customer permission to believe they’re the kind of person who takes their health seriously. These emotional jobs are often more powerful purchase drivers than the functional ones, and they’re far less likely to be copied by a competitor who is only watching feature sets.

The social job is about how the customer wants to be perceived by others. What does hiring this product signal to their peers, their team, their family? This is particularly relevant in B2B, where a procurement decision is also a professional reputation decision. I’ve seen clients choose agencies not because they were the best technical fit, but because hiring a well-known name made the internal stakeholder look credible to their board. That’s a social job, and pretending it doesn’t exist doesn’t make it go away.

Effective positioning addresses all three dimensions, even if the messaging foregrounds only one. The brand that wins the functional job but ignores the emotional and social jobs is always vulnerable to a competitor who pays attention to the full picture.

How JTBD Changes the Competitive Landscape

One of the most practically useful things JTBD does is expand your view of who you’re actually competing with. Category-level thinking produces category-level competitors. But when you define competition at the job level, you often find that your real competition is something you weren’t tracking at all.

When I was running an agency and we were pitching for retained SEO work, we often assumed our competition was other SEO agencies. Sometimes it was. But just as often, the real competitor was an in-house executive who had convinced the marketing director they could handle it internally, or a freelancer who was already embedded in the account, or simply the client’s inertia, the tendency to keep doing what they were already doing because switching felt like more effort than it was worth.

None of those showed up in a competitive landscape analysis. But they were the things we actually had to overcome to win the business.

JTBD forces that honest assessment. The question isn’t “who else offers what we offer?” It’s “what else could the customer hire to get this job done?” That includes doing nothing, doing it themselves, using a workaround, or hiring something from an adjacent category.

This matters enormously for positioning. If your real competition is customer inertia, your messaging needs to make the cost of staying still feel real. If your real competition is a DIY approach, your messaging needs to address why professional execution produces better outcomes. These are very different arguments from the ones you’d make if you were only thinking about category competitors.

Understanding the full competitive picture also helps with the brand awareness problem. Wistia has written clearly about why brand awareness alone isn’t the goal. Awareness without relevance to the job the customer is trying to do doesn’t convert. JTBD gives you the relevance layer that pure awareness campaigns miss.

Writing a Job Statement That’s Actually Useful

A job statement is a structured way of capturing the job your customer is hiring your brand to do. It needs to be specific enough to be useful without being so narrow that it excludes real purchase scenarios.

A useful format is: “When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome].”

The situation anchors the job in a real context. The motivation captures what the customer is trying to accomplish. The expected outcome describes what success looks like from their perspective, not yours.

For example, a B2B software company might write: “When I’m preparing a board presentation and I don’t have time to pull data from multiple systems, I want a single dashboard that shows the metrics my CEO cares about, so I can walk into that meeting looking like I have control of the business.”

Notice that statement includes a functional job (pull data quickly), an emotional job (feel in control), and a social job (look credible to the CEO). It also specifies the situation precisely enough to rule out irrelevant use cases, which is what makes it useful for positioning.

Compare that to: “When I need to analyse data, I want reporting tools, so I can make better decisions.” That’s not a job statement. It’s a category description. It tells you nothing about where to compete, what to say, or how to differentiate.

The discipline of writing a sharp job statement is harder than it looks. Most teams default to vague functional descriptions because specificity feels risky. What if we’re too narrow? What if we exclude someone? But vague positioning is the real risk. A brand that stands for everything is hired for nothing.

JTBD in Practice: Where It Fits in the Strategy Process

Jobs to Be Done is not a standalone methodology. It’s a lens that sharpens the work you’re already doing, specifically the audience work and the positioning work that sit at the core of any serious brand strategy.

The best place to apply it is early, before messaging or creative work begins, when you’re still defining the problem. If you’ve already committed to a positioning direction, JTBD can feel like it’s questioning decisions that have already been made. Used at the start, it resets the problem definition in a way that makes everything downstream more precise.

In practice, this means running JTBD interviews before you write a positioning statement. These aren’t standard focus groups or customer satisfaction surveys. They’re structured conversations designed to surface the situation, motivation, and expected outcome behind a purchase decision. The questions aren’t “what features do you value?” They’re “walk me through the last time you hired something to solve this problem. What was happening? What made you decide to act? What did you consider? What would have made you choose differently?”

The answers to those questions are the raw material for a positioning statement that reflects how customers actually think, rather than how the brand team assumes they think. HubSpot’s breakdown of brand strategy components outlines the building blocks, but JTBD is what gives those components their commercial grounding.

One practical note: you don’t need dozens of interviews to find useful patterns. In my experience running this kind of work across multiple categories, patterns tend to emerge after eight to twelve interviews. You’re not trying to reach statistical significance. You’re trying to understand the dominant jobs that drive purchase decisions in your category, and the situations that trigger them.

Where Brands Typically Get This Wrong

The most common mistake is treating JTBD as a research exercise rather than a strategic one. Teams run the interviews, produce a report, and then go back to writing the same messaging they would have written anyway. The jobs are documented but not acted on.

This usually happens because the insights from JTBD interviews challenge existing assumptions, and challenging assumptions is uncomfortable. If the research reveals that customers are hiring your product to solve a problem you weren’t positioning against, the implication is that your current positioning is off. That’s a difficult conversation to have internally, especially if the current positioning has executive sponsorship.

I’ve seen this play out in a few different ways. One client had built an entire brand narrative around innovation and technology leadership. The JTBD work revealed that their customers weren’t hiring them for innovation. They were hiring them because they were reliable and easy to work with in a category full of overpromising vendors. The emotional job was “don’t give me something else to worry about.” That’s a very different positioning from “we’re at the frontier of what’s possible.” Both might be true, but only one reflects why customers were actually choosing them.

The second common mistake is identifying the job correctly but then communicating it in a way that sounds generic. “We help busy professionals save time” is technically a job statement, but it’s so broad it positions you against everything and nothing simultaneously. The specificity of the job statement needs to carry through into the messaging.

Brand consistency matters here too. Consistent brand voice is what makes JTBD-informed positioning stick over time. If the job is clearly defined but the voice shifts between channels or campaigns, the positioning loses its coherence.

JTBD and Brand Loyalty: What the Framework Predicts

One of the more counterintuitive implications of JTBD is what it says about brand loyalty. Loyalty, in the JTBD view, is not primarily about emotional attachment to a brand. It’s about a brand consistently doing the job better than the alternatives. When the job changes, or when a better solution to the same job appears, customers switch. The loyalty was always to the outcome, not the brand.

This has significant implications for how you think about retention and brand investment. Research on local brand loyalty shows that convenience and consistency are often more powerful retention drivers than emotional brand affinity. Customers who feel a brand reliably does the job stay. Customers who feel the job is being done inconsistently, or that a better option has appeared, leave, regardless of how much they liked the brand.

This is why JTBD is also a useful diagnostic tool when a brand is losing market share. Before assuming the problem is awareness or brand perception, it’s worth asking whether the core job is still being done well. Sometimes the problem isn’t the marketing. It’s that a competitor has found a better way to do the same job, and no amount of brand investment will fix that.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and the campaigns that held up under scrutiny were consistently the ones where the brand had a clear, specific answer to the question: what job are we doing for this customer that no one else does as well? The ones that didn’t hold up were often beautifully produced, emotionally resonant, and completely disconnected from any real customer motivation.

Applying JTBD to Positioning Across Multiple Segments

One of the more complex challenges in brand strategy is that the same product is often hired for different jobs by different customer segments. A project management tool might be hired by a startup founder to reduce chaos, by a marketing director to prove ROI to the board, and by a freelancer to look professional to clients. These are three different jobs, and they require different positioning angles, even if the product is identical.

This is where JTBD connects directly to brand architecture decisions. If the jobs are sufficiently different, you may need distinct positioning for each segment, either through different messaging, different product tiers, or in some cases, different brand expressions entirely. BCG’s work on brand strategy across markets highlights how the same brand can carry different meanings in different contexts, and how managing that requires deliberate architecture rather than hoping the brand stretches naturally.

The practical approach is to map the primary job for each significant segment, then look for the common thread. Most brands have one core job that cuts across segments, even if the situation and expected outcome vary. That core job becomes the foundation of the master brand positioning. The segment-specific angles become the messaging layers that sit on top of it.

When I was growing the agency from around 20 people to close to 100, we were effectively being hired for different jobs by different clients. Some wanted performance marketing expertise. Some wanted a European hub that could coordinate across markets. Some wanted an agency that would just get things done without requiring constant management. The common thread was reliability and commercial competence. That became the positioning. The specific capability conversations happened at the segment level.

Measuring Whether Your Brand Is Doing the Job

If JTBD is your positioning framework, your measurement framework needs to reflect it. Standard brand tracking metrics like awareness and consideration are useful, but they don’t tell you whether customers perceive your brand as the best solution to the specific job you’re positioning against.

The question you want to be able to answer is: when customers are in the situation we’ve identified, do they think of us first? And when they hire us, do they feel the job was done? Those are different questions from “have you heard of this brand?” and “would you consider this brand?”

This means building research questions around the job statement. If your job statement is about making a specific situation easier, your tracking should measure whether customers associate your brand with that situation. If the job includes an emotional dimension, your tracking should measure whether customers feel that emotion when they use your product.

Brand awareness measurement is a starting point, but JTBD-informed brands need to go further and measure situational relevance, not just general recall. The brands that do this well build a feedback loop between customer experience and positioning, so the positioning evolves as the job evolves.

Agility in how you respond to that feedback matters. BCG’s work on agile marketing organisations makes the case that the ability to adapt quickly to changing customer needs is a structural advantage, not just a cultural one. JTBD gives you the diagnostic framework to know when the job is shifting before your sales numbers tell you.

The full context for how positioning decisions connect to the rest of your brand strategy, from value proposition to architecture to tone of voice, is available in the Brand Positioning and Archetypes hub. If you’re using JTBD as a lens, it works best when it’s integrated into a complete strategy process rather than applied in isolation.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions