Jobs to Be Done Theory: What Brands Get Wrong About Why People Buy

Jobs to Be Done theory holds that customers don’t buy products, they hire them to do a job. The job is rarely about the product itself. It’s about the progress a person is trying to make in a specific situation, and your product either helps them make that progress or it doesn’t. That reframe sounds simple. In practice, it changes almost everything about how you position a brand.

Most brands describe what they are. Jobs to Be Done asks what work they’re being hired to do, and for whom, and under what circumstances. Those are harder questions. They’re also more commercially useful ones.

Where the Theory Came From, and Why It Matters Now

Clayton Christensen developed the Jobs to Be Done framework as a lens for understanding disruption. His observation was that companies kept getting blindsided by competitors they hadn’t taken seriously, and the reason was almost always the same: they’d been tracking the wrong competition. They were watching companies that made similar products, not companies that helped customers do the same job in a different way.

The famous milkshake example from his research is worth understanding properly. A fast food chain wanted to sell more milkshakes. They segmented by demographics, surveyed customers, tweaked the product. Sales didn’t move. When researchers instead asked what job the milkshake was being hired to do, a different picture emerged. Most milkshakes were bought in the morning, by commuters, who wanted something that would keep them occupied during a long drive and hold them until lunch. The milkshake wasn’t competing with other milkshakes. It was competing with a banana, a granola bar, a coffee. Once you understand the job, the product decisions become obvious. Make it thicker so it lasts longer. Put the ordering kiosk outside so the commuter doesn’t have to park.

That example is 20 years old and still routinely misapplied. Most marketers hear it and think about messaging. The point is about understanding the competitive set, the purchase context, and the functional and emotional requirements of the job. Messaging is downstream of all of that.

If you’re working through how this connects to broader positioning decisions, the Brand Positioning and Archetypes hub covers the strategic frameworks that sit around and beneath jobs-based thinking.

The Three Dimensions of Every Job

Every job has three dimensions, and brands that only address one of them tend to underperform on the others without knowing why.

The functional dimension is what most brands default to. It’s the practical task the customer is trying to accomplish: get from A to B, store this data, clean this surface. Functional jobs are easy to articulate and easy to brief into a product or campaign. They’re also the most commoditised, because every competitor is working on the same dimension.

The emotional dimension is about how the customer wants to feel, or how they want to stop feeling, as a result of hiring the product. This is where a lot of purchase decisions are actually made, including in categories that present themselves as rational. I’ve worked across financial services, logistics, and enterprise software, and in every one of those categories the emotional job was doing more work than the clients wanted to admit. The CFO who buys the more expensive accounting platform isn’t just buying features. They’re buying confidence. The feeling that if something goes wrong, they chose the credible option.

The social dimension is about how the purchase affects how others perceive the customer, or how the customer perceives themselves relative to others. This isn’t just a luxury goods consideration. In B2B, the social job is often the most powerful driver. Procurement teams buy from known brands partly because it’s defensible. “We went with the market leader” is a sentence that protects careers. Understanding that social job changes how you position credibility, case studies, and client lists.

Why Most Brands Research the Wrong Thing

The standard approach to customer research asks people what they think of a product, what features they’d like, how they rate their experience. That research is useful for optimisation. It’s almost useless for positioning.

The problem is that people are poor at explaining their own decisions. They rationalise after the fact. They give you the respectable answer, not the real one. And they describe the product they have, not the job they were trying to do when they first went looking.

I spent a significant amount of time in agency pitches watching clients present customer research that told them what their customers thought of them. Almost none of it told them what their customers were trying to accomplish before they’d even heard of the brand. That gap is where positioning goes wrong. You end up optimising your messaging around existing perceptions instead of owning the job that drives the category.

The more useful research question is: what were you doing before you found this solution, and what made you start looking? That question gets you to the job. It also gets you to the trigger, which is the specific moment or situation that moved someone from passive dissatisfaction to active search. Triggers are commercially important because they tell you when and where to show up, not just what to say when you do.

There’s a related issue with how brands define their competitive set. Brand loyalty is more fragile than most marketers assume, and part of the reason is that brands define their competition too narrowly. If you only track direct category competitors, you’ll miss the indirect alternatives your customers are actually considering. The milkshake competing with a banana isn’t an edge case. It’s the norm.

How to Identify the Real Job

The most reliable method is interviewing recent switchers, people who recently changed from one solution to another, including people who switched to you, away from you, and people who switched from doing nothing to doing something.

Switchers are more useful than satisfied customers because they can articulate the moment of change. They remember the friction. They remember what wasn’t working and what finally pushed them to act. That narrative, told in their own words, is your positioning brief.

When I was building out the SEO practice at iProspect, one of the most useful things we did was talk to clients who had left previous agencies. Not to win them back, but to understand what the job actually was. What came back wasn’t about deliverables or reporting. It was about confidence. They wanted to feel like someone understood their business, not just their keywords. That insight shaped how we onboarded, how we structured account teams, and how we communicated progress. It wasn’t a messaging exercise. It changed the service model.

A few questions that tend to surface the real job in interviews:

• What were you using or doing before this, and what wasn’t working about it?
• What finally made you start looking for something different?
• What else did you consider, and what made you rule it out?
• What would you have done if this option hadn’t existed?
• How did you know it was working?

That last question is particularly useful. It gets at the success criteria the customer was using, which is often different from the success criteria the brand is tracking. Alignment between those two is where strong positioning lives.

Jobs to Be Done as a Positioning Input

Where Jobs to Be Done earns its place is in positioning strategy, specifically in defining what you stand for, for whom, and against what alternatives. It’s not primarily a messaging tool. Plenty of agencies use it to generate copy angles and call it done. That’s a waste of the framework.

Used properly, it answers three positioning questions that most brands struggle with. First: who is the right customer? Not the broadest possible audience, but the customer whose job you can do better than any alternative. Second: what is the real competitive set? Not just direct competitors, but every option the customer could hire instead. Third: what is the specific progress the customer is trying to make, and what are the functional, emotional, and social requirements of that progress?

Those three answers give you a positioning that is grounded in actual customer behaviour rather than internal assumptions about what the brand is. Brand awareness without a clear job to be done is expensive and largely pointless. You can build recognition for a brand that nobody has a reason to hire.

The most durable brand positions I’ve seen, across the categories I’ve worked in, have all been built on a clearly defined job. They didn’t necessarily use the Jobs to Be Done vocabulary, but the logic was the same. They knew precisely what progress they were helping customers make, and they made every brand decision in service of that.

Where the Framework Gets Misused

Jobs to Be Done has become popular enough that it’s started to accumulate the same misapplications as every other framework that gets picked up by the marketing industry at scale.

The most common misuse is treating it as a customer empathy exercise rather than a competitive strategy tool. Teams run workshops, map emotional jobs, produce experience maps with feelings annotated at each stage, and then write the same campaign they were going to write anyway. The framework becomes a process artefact rather than a strategic input.

The second misuse is defining the job too broadly. “Our customers want to feel confident” is not a job. It’s a sentiment. A job has a specific context, a specific trigger, a specific success criterion, and a specific set of alternatives the customer could have hired instead. If your job statement could apply to any brand in any category, it’s not doing any work.

The third misuse is applying it only to new product development and ignoring its implications for brand positioning and communications. Christensen’s original work was focused on innovation and disruption, which is probably why the framework gets siloed in product teams. But the same logic applies to how you position an existing brand. What job is your brand being hired to do? What are the circumstances under which customers hire it? What are they firing when they hire you?

I’ve judged the Effie Awards, which evaluate marketing effectiveness rather than creative quality. The entries that consistently performed best weren’t the ones with the cleverest creative. They were the ones where the brand had clearly identified a job, understood who had that job, and built a coherent strategy around owning it. The creative was in service of something real. That’s a Jobs to Be Done outcome even when nobody in the room used that language.

Connecting Jobs to Brand Consistency

One of the underappreciated benefits of building positioning on a clearly defined job is that it gives you a stable foundation for brand consistency over time. Consistent brand voice is easier to maintain when there’s a clear strategic rationale behind it, rather than a style guide that exists independently of the brand’s purpose.

When a brand knows its job, decisions about tone, channel, product, and partnership become easier to make. The question isn’t “does this feel on brand?” but “does this help us do the job better?” Those are different filters and the second one is more commercially useful.

The brands that drift, that end up with inconsistent positioning across markets or channels, are almost always brands that never had a clear job in the first place. They were built on attributes and aesthetics rather than on a defined role in the customer’s life. When the market shifts or leadership changes, there’s nothing stable to hold onto.

Brand equity is easier to build and harder to erode when the brand has a clear functional role. A brand that owns a job has a reason to exist that goes beyond its current product. That’s what gives it resilience when category conditions change.

Applying Jobs to Be Done Across the Brand Architecture

For brands with multiple products or a portfolio structure, Jobs to Be Done provides a useful architecture principle. Each product should be hireable for a distinct job. If two products are competing for the same job in the same context, one of them is redundant. If a job exists in the market and nothing in the portfolio addresses it, that’s a gap.

When I was running a global agency network, we had a version of this problem. Different service lines had been built up over time and were often pitched to the same client for overlapping purposes. The internal competition was damaging client relationships and making us harder to buy. The solution wasn’t a rebrand. It was defining the distinct job each service line did and making sure the sales approach reflected that. SEO is hired to build compounding organic visibility over time. Paid search is hired to capture intent at the moment it exists. Those are different jobs with different hiring criteria, different timelines, and different success metrics. Once clients understood that, the conversation changed.

The same logic applies to brand architecture decisions about whether to use a monolithic brand, endorsed brands, or a house of brands. The answer depends partly on whether the jobs are similar enough to share a brand without confusing the customer. If the jobs are very different, sharing a brand can create cognitive dissonance. If the jobs are closely related, a monolithic structure reinforces the brand’s ownership of that space.

There’s more on how positioning decisions connect to brand architecture and differentiation in the Brand Positioning and Archetypes section of The Marketing Juice. Jobs to Be Done sits within a broader set of strategic tools, and it works best when it’s integrated with them rather than applied in isolation.

The Commercial Case for Getting This Right

There’s a practical commercial argument for investing in Jobs to Be Done research that often gets lost in the theoretical discussion of the framework.

Brands that don’t understand their job tend to compete on price, because price is the default when you can’t articulate why you’re the right hire. Brand loyalty weakens when customers can’t identify a clear reason to stay, and the clearest reason to stay is that no alternative does the job as well. That’s a defensible position. “We’re cheaper this week” is not.

Brands that understand their job also tend to be better at identifying adjacent opportunities. If you know the job, you can ask whether there are related jobs the same customer needs done, or whether the same job exists in adjacent markets you haven’t entered yet. That’s how category leadership gets built over time, not through brand extension for its own sake, but through a coherent expansion of the jobs you’re equipped to do.

Strong brands consistently outperform weaker ones on commercial metrics, and the brands that maintain that strength over time are almost always the ones that have clarity about what they’re for. Jobs to Be Done is one of the clearest frameworks for achieving that clarity. Not because it’s elegant theory, but because it forces the brand to be defined from the outside in, by what the customer is trying to accomplish, rather than from the inside out, by what the company wants to say about itself.

That shift in perspective is harder than it sounds. Most organisations are structured around their own products and processes. Reorienting around the customer’s job requires a different kind of discipline. It requires talking to people who left, not just people who stayed. It requires defining success in the customer’s terms, not the brand’s. It requires being honest about what job you’re actually equipped to do, rather than the broader, more impressive-sounding job you’d like to claim.

Done well, it produces positioning that is specific, defensible, and grounded in something real. That’s a higher bar than most brand strategy clears. It’s also the bar worth clearing.

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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