Jobs to Be Done: The Framework That Fixes Broken Positioning

Jobs to Be Done is a framework for understanding why customers buy, not just what they buy. Instead of segmenting by demographics or category, it asks a simpler question: what problem is this person trying to solve, and what are they hiring this product to do? The examples that follow show how that question, answered precisely, changes everything from positioning to product development to messaging.

The framework was developed by Clayton Christensen and has since become one of the more practically useful ideas in marketing strategy, largely because it forces you to think about motivation rather than behaviour. Behaviour tells you what happened. Motivation tells you why, and why is where positioning lives.

Why Most Brands Are Solving the Wrong Problem

I spent a long time in agency environments where client briefs arrived pre-loaded with demographic assumptions. “Our audience is 25-45, ABC1, digitally engaged.” That description could apply to roughly 40 million people in the UK. It tells you almost nothing about what they want from a product on a Tuesday afternoon when they’re standing in a supermarket aisle.

The problem with demographic segmentation is that it describes who someone is, not what they’re trying to do. A 38-year-old professional buying a protein bar at 7am is not the same buyer as a 38-year-old professional buying that same bar at 4pm. The job is different. The first is about fuel before a commute. The second is about managing hunger without ruining dinner. Same person, same product, two different jobs. If your positioning only speaks to one, you’re leaving the other entirely unaddressed.

Jobs to Be Done cuts through that by asking what progress the customer is trying to make. Not what they like, not who they are, but what they’re trying to get done. That question is uncomfortable for brands that have built positioning around product features, because it forces you to admit that your product is a means to an end, not the end itself.

If you’re thinking about how this connects to the broader challenge of building a brand that stands for something specific, the work I’ve covered on brand positioning and archetypes provides a useful frame for where Jobs to Be Done sits within a wider strategy.

What a Job to Be Done Actually Looks Like

A job statement follows a structure: when [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [expected outcome]. That structure matters because it captures context, not just desire. Context is what most briefs strip out, and context is what determines whether your product is the right hire for the job.

There are three layers to any job. The functional job is the practical task. The emotional job is how the customer wants to feel, or avoid feeling. The social job is how they want to be perceived by others. Most brands address the functional layer because it’s the most visible. The emotional and social layers are where the real competition happens, and where most positioning falls short.

Take a simple example: someone buying a luxury watch. The functional job is to tell the time, which a five-pound watch does perfectly well. The emotional job might be to feel that they’ve arrived, that they’ve earned something. The social job is to signal that status to people whose opinion matters to them. Brands like Rolex and Patek Philippe are not competing on functional job performance. They’ve won by owning the emotional and social layers so completely that the functional layer is almost irrelevant to the purchase decision.

Jobs to Be Done Examples Across Real Categories

Concrete examples are the fastest way to make this framework usable. These aren’t hypothetical. They’re the kinds of job analyses that produce real positioning decisions.

Slack. The functional job Slack was hired for was team communication. But the job it actually solved better than email was reducing the anxiety of not knowing what was happening. Email creates uncertainty: did they see it? When will they reply? Slack’s real job was delivering ambient awareness of a team’s activity. That’s an emotional job, and it explains why adoption spread so fast inside organisations once one team started using it. People hired it to feel less out of the loop.

McDonald’s milkshakes. This is probably the most cited example in Jobs to Be Done literature, and it earned that status. Christensen’s team found that a large proportion of milkshake sales happened in the morning, bought by commuters driving alone. The job wasn’t “I want something sweet.” The job was “I need something that keeps me occupied on a long drive, fills me up until lunch, and is easy to consume one-handed.” The milkshake was hired because it was thick enough to last the experience and didn’t make a mess. Once you understand that job, you know exactly what to optimise: viscosity, cup design, drive-through speed. Not flavour variety.

Airbnb. The functional job is accommodation. But the job a significant portion of Airbnb’s early adopters were hiring it for was feeling like a local rather than a tourist. Hotels do the functional job adequately. Airbnb won the emotional and social job: the story you tell about your trip, the Instagram post in a Parisian apartment rather than a chain hotel corridor, the sense that you experienced a place rather than just visited it. That job shaped everything from their brand voice to their photography standards to the “Belong Anywhere” positioning.

LinkedIn Premium. The functional job is access to more data about who viewed your profile and more InMail credits. But the job most buyers are hiring it for is reducing the anxiety of a job search, specifically the feeling that they’re doing everything they can. LinkedIn Premium is partly a functional tool and partly a psychological comfort purchase. That’s a legitimate job, and it’s why the product sells even when many users could accomplish the same outcomes with a free account and more patience.

Accounting software for small businesses. The functional job is bookkeeping. But the job most small business owners are hiring accounting software for is peace of mind around tax compliance and the feeling that their business is under control. The emotional job is about reducing dread, specifically the dread of getting something wrong and facing consequences. That’s why software like QuickBooks and Xero lean so heavily on reassurance language in their marketing rather than feature lists. They’re not selling accounting. They’re selling the absence of financial anxiety.

How Jobs to Be Done Changes Your Competitive Set

One of the most practically useful things the framework does is expand your competitive set in ways that category thinking misses entirely.

When I was running an agency, we had a client in the B2B software space who was obsessing over their direct competitors, all of whom were similar products at similar price points. What they weren’t looking at was the spreadsheet. The job their customers were hiring the software for was “make my reporting process less embarrassing in front of the board.” A well-built Excel model was doing that job adequately for a large portion of their addressable market. The real competition wasn’t the other SaaS products. It was inertia and a spreadsheet that worked well enough.

That insight changed the entire go-to-market approach. Instead of competing on feature parity with direct rivals, the messaging shifted to the emotional cost of the manual process: the Sunday evening spent updating spreadsheets, the risk of errors before a quarterly review, the time lost on formatting instead of analysis. That’s a Jobs to Be Done insight applied directly to positioning.

The same logic applies in consumer categories. Netflix doesn’t just compete with other streaming services. It competes with sleep, with social media, with books, with any activity that fills the job of “wind down and disengage from the day.” Understanding that job is why Netflix invests so heavily in content variety and autoplay. They’re not just competing for subscribers. They’re competing for the evening.

Brand loyalty, when it exists, tends to be built around how well a brand consistently delivers on the job, not just the product category. Research on local brand loyalty consistently points to emotional consistency as a driver of repeat purchase, which aligns with what the Jobs framework surfaces: customers return to brands that reliably get the job done, not just brands they can recall.

Where Brands Get This Wrong in Practice

The most common mistake is treating Jobs to Be Done as a messaging exercise rather than a strategic one. Teams run a workshop, identify a few job statements, and then write new headlines. That’s not how the framework works.

Jobs to Be Done should change what you build, not just what you say. If your product doesn’t actually deliver on the job customers are hiring it for, better messaging will accelerate churn, not prevent it. You’ll attract more people who discover the gap between the promise and the reality.

The second mistake is identifying the functional job and stopping there. I’ve sat in brand strategy sessions where the team landed on a job statement that was essentially a restatement of the product description. “When I need to manage my finances, I want a tool that tracks my spending so I can understand where my money goes.” That’s a feature description dressed up as a job. The emotional layer is missing. Why does understanding where your money goes matter? What feeling does the customer want to have, or avoid? Usually it’s something closer to: “I want to feel like I’m in control of my life, not just reacting to it.” That’s a job worth building positioning around.

The third mistake is assuming the job is static. Jobs evolve with context. A customer who hired your product during a period of rapid business growth may have a completely different job when that growth slows. The brands that lose customers in downturns are often the ones that never updated their understanding of the job. Brand loyalty under economic pressure tends to collapse fastest for brands that were hired for aspirational jobs rather than functional ones, because aspirational jobs are the first to be deprioritised when budgets tighten.

Applying the Framework to Brand Positioning

Jobs to Be Done connects directly to positioning because positioning is in the end a claim about which job you do better than anyone else. A brand that tries to be hired for every possible job ends up owning none of them. The brands with the strongest positioning are the ones that have identified a specific job, often one with a strong emotional or social dimension, and built everything around delivering it consistently.

When I was growing an agency from a small team to close to a hundred people, the job our clients were hiring us for shifted as we scaled. Early on, they hired us for execution: we were fast, reliable, and delivered what we promised. As we grew into a top-five office in a global network, the job changed. Clients were hiring us for credibility and for access to a team that could operate across markets without the coordination overhead. Understanding that shift changed how we pitched, how we structured teams, and how we talked about our work in credentials. The product was the same agency. The job had changed.

A well-constructed brand strategy should map directly to a specific job. The brand promise should be a credible answer to the question: why hire us for this job instead of someone else? If it isn’t, the positioning is likely built around what the brand wants to say rather than what the customer needs to hear. A coherent brand strategy requires that kind of customer-back thinking at its foundation.

Brand awareness matters, but only in relation to a job. Being known for nothing specific is not an asset. The problem with focusing purely on brand awareness is that it treats recognition as an end in itself, when recognition only converts to preference if the customer associates your brand with a job they need done.

The broader discipline of brand positioning, including how archetypes, differentiation, and customer insight connect, is something I’ve written about in depth. If you’re working through how Jobs to Be Done fits into a wider positioning project, the brand strategy hub covers the surrounding territory.

How to Run a Jobs to Be Done Analysis Without It Becoming a Workshop Ritual

The framework is most useful when it’s grounded in actual customer conversations rather than internal assumptions. The best job statements come from listening to customers describe a purchase decision in their own words, specifically the language they use around the moment they decided to buy, what they considered, and what would have made them choose differently.

Switch interviews are particularly useful here. These are conversations with customers who recently switched to your product from a competitor, or who recently switched away. The switching moment is where the job becomes most visible, because switching requires enough dissatisfaction with the current hire to go through the friction of changing. What was the trigger? What was the previous product failing to do? What did they hope the new one would do differently? Those answers contain the job.

Once you have job statements from real conversations, the analysis becomes a prioritisation exercise. Which jobs are underserved in the market? Which jobs are you best positioned to deliver on given your actual capabilities? Which jobs are large enough to be commercially meaningful? The intersection of those three questions is where positioning decisions get made.

Measuring how well you’re delivering on a job is harder than measuring brand awareness or recall, but more useful. Brand awareness metrics tell you whether people know you exist. Job delivery metrics, typically built from customer satisfaction data, retention rates, and qualitative feedback, tell you whether they’ll hire you again. The second question matters more.

Advocacy tends to follow job performance closely. Customers who feel a brand reliably gets their job done become advocates without being asked. BCG’s work on brand advocacy points to the link between brand performance and word-of-mouth growth, which is consistent with what Jobs to Be Done would predict: when a product does the job better than the customer expected, they tell people.

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.

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