There is a theory about causality in innovation. That's called the job theory, and it predicts and allows us to predict in advance whether customers are going to buy our product or not. Whatever it is that you sell, I bet that today something happened to somebody, that's going to cause them to buy in 18-36 months from now. It happened today. They didn't go on anybody's website. They haven't done anything yet, but something happened today, that is going to go through a pattern of events that will lead them to buy something in 18-36 months. Hey. It's Kyle from HubSpot Academy. If you have a well-defined buyer persona, then you know a lot about the person who tends to buy from you, and that's great. But alone, it isn't enough. Here's Harvard Business School, Professor Clayton Christensen. Well, here I am, Clayton Christensen, and as you can see, I have all characteristics and attributes. I'm 65 years old, unfortunately. I'm six feet, eight inches tall, which means I always cut the head off myself when I go into a door. I have failed at losing weight for the last 30 years. I married a wonderful wife fortunately. I worked at the Harvard Business School, which has plus and minuses. There are all other characteristics or attributes about Clayton Christensen, but none of these characteristics and attributes have yet caused me to buy the New York Times today. There might be a correlation between my characteristics and the propensity that I might have to buy the New York Times. But the attributes don't cause me to buy that product, nor do our characteristics or attributes cause us to buy any product or service. What causes us to buy products or not is, just every day stuff happens to us. Jobs arise in our life and we need to get these jobs addressed. If you develop a persona, it will give you a correlation between the characteristics of a potential product and the decision to purchase a product. But the attributes of a person don't cause us to buy a product or service, and by their very nature, a statement of correlation brings unpredictability to the understanding of the market. Whereas understanding, what's the customer trying to do, really helps you in a dramatic way. If you want to understand what your customers are trying to do, you're going to want to use something called jobs theory. Jobs theory is a way of digging into why people buy products. The textbook example is for power tools. People don't want to buy a drill, they want to buy a quarter-inch hole, and jobs theory takes it a step further to say that they aren't even buying a hole. They're simply trying to hang a picture or build a tree house or spy on their neighbors. Essentially, people have jobs they're trying to get done, and they hire products to do those jobs. If your product does the job better than any other product, people will hire it over and over again. When you start to look at your product and this way, you'll learn things about your target market you might never have otherwise known. Here's Clayton again. The logic behind this is, what causes people to buy a product is that there's a job that needs to be done, and when they realize they have a job to do, they can't not do anything. Every time we have a job arises in our lives, sometimes we can hire something to do the job, but sometimes nobody has developed, a solution to that jobs to be done, and so we just can't buy, meaning we do work or workarounds, because there's nothing that we can find to do the job, so I have to make do, and when we make do with something, when that's not a product, we call that non-consumption, and so people look at people who are buying the product to get the job done, and they think that that's the size of the market. But the real market includes the people who buy the product but then there are all of these people who don't buy the product because those are too complicated and expensive. So, they make with nothing at all. One of the biggest surprises in our work, is the realization that in most markets where we think that the market is mature and innovation is slowing down, in reality, it's a vibrant market for non-consumption. If you just make a product that is affordable and accessible, a homely population of people can now realize that, I could buy that product and it would get the job done for me. When people buy your product, they're hiring it to perform some job. That seems simple enough, but the surprising thing is that people might not be hiring your product to do the job you designed it to do. You need to do everything you can to match your product to the job your persona is trying to do. To make this idea more concrete, let's look at a real-life example. To give you an illustration of how we develop this in a deeper way, McDonald's approached this. McDonald's is a very sophisticated marketing company. They have data up the Kazoo. They decided that they needed to innovate in their milkshake private lines so that more people would buy milkshakes. They had data that allowed them to draw a quintessential customer of milkshake customers. They then would identify this profile of a milkshake customer. It turns out I fit that profile very well. They would then invite people who hit the profile, into conference rooms and they'd ask them questions, trying to understand how could we improve the milkshake so you'll buy more of them. When they get very clear feedback, they would then improve the milkshake on those dimensions of performance, and that had no impact on sales or profits whatsoever. We invited ourselves and they agreed that we could try to approach it in a very different way. There's a job out there somewhere that arises in people's life on occasion that causes them to need to buy a milkshake. We need to understand what the job is, that causes people to buy milkshake. One of our colleagues stood in a McDonald's restaurant for 18 hours one day and just took very careful notes on what time did he buy the milkshake, what was he wearing, was he alone or with other people, did he buy other food with it or just the milkshake and did he eat it in the restaurant or did he go off in the car and take off? It turned out that about half of the milkshakes were sold before 8:30 in the morning. It was the only thing they bought, they were always alone and they always got in the car and drove off with it. We came the next morning and positioned ourselves outside the restaurant so that we could confront these people as they were emerging with their milkshake. In a language that they could better understand, we asked them, ''Excuse me. Can you explain what job arose in your life that caused you to come here at 6:30 in the morning to hire a milkshake, to get this. What's the job to be done here?'' As they would struggle to answer why they came at 6:30, we'd ask them, ''Step back a minute and think about the last situation in which you had the same situation, needing to get the same job done, but you didn't come here to hire a milkshake from McDonald's. What did you hire to get the job done?'' One guy said, "Yeah, I hire doughnuts to do the job, but I can never hire just one." Another guy said, "I do bagels, but boy, they're dry and they're tasteless." I have to steer the car with my knees while am putting cream cheese on, and it turns out one of them said, I hired a snickers bar to do the job that I felt so guilty, I have never hired snickers again, and one guy said, I never thought about it before, but last Friday I hired a banana to do the job, but it doesn't do the job very well at all. You finish it in less than a minute, but let me tell you, when I go to McDonald's, it is so viscous, it takes me about 23 minutes to suck it up that thin little straw, and I don't care what the ingredients are, all I know is that when ten o'clock comes, I'm still full, and the job that all of these people were trying to get done, was I have a long and boring drive to work, and I needed something that would just keep me engaged with life while I'm driving the car. Am not hungry yet, but I know I'll be hungry by ten o'clock, part of the job is, I need something to eat that would keep myself full when ten o'clock happens, and that's the job that they're hiring the milkshake to do, and that is they have a long and boring drive to work, then they needed to add dimensions of it, to keep them engaged with life. From the customer's point of view, the milkshake does the job better than any of the competitors, and the competitors from the customer's point of view are not just in the product category, but they draw from bananas and donuts and bagels as I mentioned. When you think about how big the job is, you have to look at who the real competitors are from the customer's point of view, and they come from very different categories. It turns out that it helps in a number of dimensions, the first one is, how big is the milkshake market for McDonald's? How big is the market for milkshakes? It's a serious question. Well, who knows? But the size of the milkshake just isn't the sum of the milkshakes at Burger King, Wendy's, and McDonald's milkshakes, but it includes from the customer's point of view, all of those other attributes of bananas, doughnuts, bagels, snickers bars. When they implemented this insight, in the portions of America where they developed it turned out to be 7 times bigger than they had thought, when it was marketed only by the attributes, most markets are characterized that way, there is a lot of non-consumption, and you can understand how to improve it only if you understand the job to be done. Fascinating, right? This can have huge implications for the way your company operates. If you sell milkshakes, and you understand that people are buying your product to help them get through the morning commute, you can start to specialize in doing that job, especially well, whatever it is you sell. If you can understand the job your customers are trying to do, if you can understand it even better than they do, and help them do it better than they thought it could be done, they'll love you for that, and if your customers love you, it'll be that much easier for your sales team to sell efficiently at a higher velocity.
