Jobs to Be Done: The Framework That Reframes What You’re Selling

The Jobs to Be Done framework is a way of understanding why customers buy things. Instead of segmenting by demographics or behaviour, it asks a more useful question: what problem is the customer trying to solve, and what are they hiring your product or service to do? That shift in framing changes how you position brands, build products, and write briefs.

Clayton Christensen popularised the idea through his milkshake research, where McDonald’s discovered that morning commuters were buying milkshakes not because they were hungry, but because they needed something to occupy their hand and keep them engaged during a long drive. The demographic data was useless. The job the product was being hired to do was everything.

Why Most Brands Are Answering the Wrong Question

I spent years sitting in brand strategy sessions where the first question on the whiteboard was some version of “who is our target customer?” Teams would build personas with names, hobbies, income brackets, and fictional Spotify playlists. It felt thorough. It rarely produced anything useful.

The problem is that demographics describe who someone is, not what they are trying to accomplish. A 38-year-old marketing director in Manchester and a 55-year-old operations manager in Munich might look nothing alike on a persona template, but if both are hiring a project management tool to reduce the number of meetings they have to sit in, they share the same job. The demographic lens splits them apart. The JTBD lens brings them together.

This matters enormously for brand positioning. If you position your product against a demographic, you end up with messaging that tries to reflect an audience back at itself. If you position against a job, you end up with messaging that solves something. The second approach is harder to write and far more effective in market.

Brand positioning decisions sit at the heart of how a business communicates its value. If you want a broader view of how the strategic pieces connect, the Brand Positioning & Archetypes hub covers the full landscape, from how archetypes shape tone to how positioning holds up under competitive pressure.

What “The Job” Actually Means

A job, in JTBD terms, is not a task. It is the progress a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance. That distinction matters because it includes the context, the constraints, and the emotional stakes, not just the functional outcome.

Christensen and his collaborators described jobs as having three dimensions. The functional dimension is the practical thing the customer is trying to get done. The emotional dimension is how they want to feel during or after the process. The social dimension is how they want to be perceived by others as a result of the choice they make.

Take a B2B software purchase. The functional job might be consolidating data from five different systems into one place. The emotional job might be feeling confident presenting numbers to the board without worrying that someone will find an error. The social job might be being seen as the person who finally solved a problem the team had been complaining about for two years. All three are real. Most product messaging only addresses the first one.

When I was running an agency, we pitched for a lot of enterprise software clients. The briefs almost always led with product capability. But when we pushed past the brief and talked to the actual buyers, the emotional and social dimensions were doing a lot of work. Fear of looking incompetent in front of leadership. Relief at having something that just worked. The desire to be the person who made a good call. None of that appeared in the product spec, but all of it shaped how we wrote the positioning.

The Real Competitive Set Is Wider Than You Think

One of the most commercially useful things JTBD does is expand the definition of your competition. When you define your market by product category, you compete against other products in that category. When you define it by job, you compete against everything a customer might hire to get that job done, including doing nothing.

The milkshake example is instructive here. McDonald’s initially assumed their competition was other fast food chains selling similar drinks. But when they mapped the job, the real competition was a banana, a cereal bar, a podcast, or a strong coffee. Understanding that changed what product improvements actually mattered and which ones were irrelevant.

I saw this play out in a category I worked in for several years: performance marketing services. Agencies assumed they were competing against other agencies. But clients were often hiring us to do a job that internal teams, freelancers, or technology platforms could also do. The job was “reduce the time my team spends on paid search management without losing performance.” Once you frame it that way, the competitive set includes an automated bidding tool, a freelancer on a day rate, and an internal hire. That changes your positioning entirely.

This is why existing brand building strategies often underperform: they define the competitive frame too narrowly. If your positioning only addresses the other brands in your category, you are ignoring the full range of alternatives your customer is actually weighing.

How to Run a JTBD Discovery Process

The framework is only as good as the research behind it. JTBD is not a desk exercise. It requires talking to customers, and specifically talking to them in a way that surfaces the context of a purchase decision, not just the outcome.

The most effective interview structure focuses on the timeline of a specific purchase. You are not asking customers what they think about your product in general. You are asking them to walk you through the last time they made a decision in this category: what prompted it, what they considered, what almost stopped them, and what finally moved them forward. The detail is in the narrative, not the evaluation.

A few questions that tend to produce useful answers:

• What was happening in your life or work that made you start looking for a solution?
• What had you tried before, and why did it fall short?
• What would have happened if you had done nothing?
• What almost stopped you from going ahead?
• How did you feel once you had made the decision?

The answers to these questions reveal the job far more reliably than any survey or analytics report. The analytics tell you what people did. The interviews tell you why, and the why is where positioning lives.

When we were growing the agency from a small regional team to one of the top-performing offices in a global network, one of the things we did consistently was talk to clients about why they had hired us, not just whether they were happy. The reasons were almost never what the pitch deck said. They hired us because someone had recommended us and they trusted that person. They hired us because a competitor had let them down and we happened to call at the right moment. They hired us because they needed someone who could work across multiple markets without losing coherence. Those were the jobs. And once we understood them, we built our positioning around delivery, trust, and operational consistency rather than the capabilities that featured in every other agency pitch.

Translating JTBD Into Brand Positioning

Once you have mapped the jobs your customers are hiring you to do, the translation into positioning is more direct than most strategy processes allow. You are not looking for a clever tagline. You are looking for the clearest possible articulation of the progress you help customers make.

That articulation needs to do three things. It needs to name the situation the customer is in when they start looking. It needs to describe the outcome they are trying to reach. And it needs to explain why your solution is the most reliable way to get there. That structure maps directly onto the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of the job.

A brand that has done this well does not need to shout. Its messaging lands because it reflects something the customer already knows to be true about their own situation. Brand equity is built when customers consistently associate your brand with solving a specific, meaningful problem. JTBD gives you the precision to earn that association rather than just claim it.

A well-constructed brand strategy requires this kind of grounding. Without it, positioning tends to drift toward generic aspiration: “we help businesses grow,” “we put customers first,” “we make the complex simple.” These statements are not wrong, but they do not tell a customer anything about whether your brand is the right one to hire for their specific job.

Where JTBD Fits in a Broader Strategy Process

Jobs to Be Done is not a replacement for other strategy tools. It works best as a diagnostic layer that sits underneath your positioning work. Before you decide how to position a brand, you need to understand what job the brand is being hired to do. Before you write a value proposition, you need to understand what progress the customer is trying to make. JTBD gives you that foundation.

It also connects directly to brand measurement. Measuring brand awareness is useful, but awareness of what? If your brand is known for something that does not map onto a job customers actually have, the awareness is not doing commercial work. JTBD helps you define what you want to be known for in terms that have purchase intent behind them.

The framework also has implications for customer retention. Brand loyalty is fragile, particularly when economic conditions change and customers start reassessing what they are spending. Brands that are clearly hired for a specific, well-understood job are more resilient in those moments because customers know exactly what they would lose by switching. Brands that are vaguely positioned around aspiration or lifestyle are more vulnerable because there is no clear job at risk.

I judged the Effie Awards for a period, and the entries that stood out were almost always the ones that had a clear, honest understanding of what the customer was trying to accomplish. Not the most creative work, not the biggest budgets. The work where you could see that someone had genuinely understood the job and built everything around solving it. That understanding is what JTBD produces when it is applied rigorously.

Common Mistakes When Applying JTBD

The framework gets misapplied often enough that it is worth being direct about where teams go wrong.

The first mistake is treating the job as a feature request. JTBD is not a product development tool in the narrow sense. It is a lens for understanding motivation. Teams that use it to generate a list of features to build have missed the point. The job is the outcome the customer is trying to reach, not the specification of the tool they want to use to reach it.

The second mistake is defining the job too narrowly. “I want to send an email newsletter” is not a job. “I want to stay in contact with my customers without it taking up half my week” is closer. The difference matters because the second framing opens up the competitive set and points toward the emotional dimension of the purchase.

The third mistake is skipping the research and inferring the job from internal assumptions. This is the most common failure mode I have seen. Teams sit in a room, agree on what they think the customer is trying to do, and build a positioning strategy around that consensus. It feels efficient. It produces positioning that is confidently wrong. The job can only be discovered by talking to customers, and specifically to customers who have recently made a purchase decision in the category.

The fourth mistake is treating JTBD as a one-time exercise. Jobs evolve. The job a customer hired your product to do in 2019 may not be the same job in 2025. Market conditions change, alternatives emerge, and customer circumstances shift. Brand advocacy is built on consistently solving the right job. If the job has moved and your positioning has not, you are solving yesterday’s problem.

JTBD and the Brief

One of the most practical applications of JTBD that I have found is in writing briefs. A brief built on JTBD thinking is structurally different from a standard creative brief. Instead of leading with the audience description and the product message, it leads with the job and the context in which the customer is trying to get it done.

That shift changes what the creative team produces. When you brief against a job, you get work that addresses a real situation. When you brief against a demographic and a list of product attributes, you get work that describes the product to people who might theoretically want it. The first approach generates empathy. The second generates catalogues.

A JTBD-informed brief typically includes: the specific circumstance that triggers the customer to start looking, the job they are trying to get done (functional, emotional, social), the alternatives they would consider including doing nothing, the barriers that might stop them from choosing your solution, and the outcome that would make them feel the decision was the right one. That is a brief you can write good work from.

Aligning marketing and commercial teams around a shared understanding of the customer job is one of the more underrated benefits of this framework. When everyone from the product team to the sales team to the communications team is working from the same job definition, the brand behaves consistently across touchpoints without needing to be policed. Consistency comes from shared understanding, not from brand guidelines.

The visual and tonal coherence that follows from this kind of alignment is also worth noting. Building a brand identity that holds together across channels is far easier when the underlying strategic logic is clear. JTBD provides that logic by anchoring every brand decision to a specific customer outcome rather than an aesthetic preference.

Applying JTBD to B2B vs B2C Contexts

The framework applies in both B2B and B2C contexts, but the dynamics are different and worth addressing separately.

In B2C, the job is usually held by one person, and the emotional and social dimensions are often the dominant factors. Someone buying a premium gym membership is not just hiring it to get fitter. They might be hiring it to feel like the kind of person who takes their health seriously, or to have a reason to get out of the house in the morning, or to reduce the anxiety that comes from feeling like they are not doing enough. The functional job (exercise) is almost secondary.

In B2B, the job is more complex because there are multiple stakeholders, each with their own version of the job. The procurement team has a different job from the end user, who has a different job from the executive sponsor. Effective B2B positioning needs to address all three, and the messaging that works at each level is different. This is one of the reasons B2B marketing is harder than it looks: you are not selling to a company, you are selling to several people inside a company who each have their own job to get done.

In agency life, we dealt with this constantly. The marketing director who championed us had a job that included being seen as someone who made smart, commercially defensible decisions. The CFO who signed off on the budget had a job that included making sure the spend was justifiable. The team who actually worked with us had a job that included not being let down by an agency that overpromised and underdelivered. Three jobs, one client, and if you only addressed one of them you were always at risk from the other two.

If you are working through how JTBD connects to your broader positioning approach, the Brand Positioning & Archetypes hub covers the strategic frameworks that sit alongside JTBD, including how archetypes can give a brand’s emotional dimension a consistent shape once you understand the job it is being hired to do.

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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