Tag: jtbd

Cheerios JTBD

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“Don’t eat them for the 100% whole grain oats. Don’t eat them because the oats can help lower cholesterol. Eat them for her.”

Cheerios commercial, 2023

The good. Jobs-to-be-done uses “Mario marketing”. Sell the power, not the flower. Why is ‘being healthy’ a goal? It’s to spend longer with your granddaughter.

This ad ran on a Wednesday morning in Florida. Who is watching television? Retirees. This CAC is money well spent.

The bad or the confusing. None, it’s a good advertisement.

🧐

One of the best ways to get better at something is to do it.

One of the best ways to get better at some thinking is to notice it. The human tendency to confirm beliefs is generally useful. So be curious. Give something a name and label to your experiences.

A Monster JTBD

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One of the best-performing stocks of the last twenty years – a famed 100-bagger – is Monster Energy.

Why didn’t we see this?

If you want to succeed at investing, Howard Marks wrote, you have to be different and you have to be right. Embedded in that is the notion that being different is hard.

If different was without social, financial, political, emotional, or mental costs then everyone would do it.

😕

Monster Energy faced at least two of our common business headwinds. First is the TiVo problem. Can an innovator (like Monster) gain distribution before market leaders with distribution (Coke, Pepsi, Anheuser Busch) gain innovation?

It’s remarkable that Monster succeeded. Their competitors already made sweetened caffeinated beverages. They already managed brands and distributed millions of liters of fluid to every gas station, bodega, and grocery store across the country.

The second is category creation. If you can’t be first, notes the second Immutable Law of Marketing, create a category where you can be. Buy-now-pay-later, fast-casual, on-demand-storage, and hard seltzer are all examples.

But the ‘energy drink’ category had a market leader: Red Bull. Not only that, the market leader had existed for nearly twenty years before Monster Energy began.

So what happened?

🍸 🆚 🥤

Sometimes the category isn’t the competition. Snickers and Milky Way don’t really compete. Honey Baked Ham, Chinese restaurants, and ordering pizza are all holiday meals but not many consumers debate between those three. It’s homemade or Honey Baked.

“Red Bull and Monster consumers are unique. Red Bull went after the extreme consumer but early on focused on on-premise service: bars and restaurants. As a result, it morphed into what I would consider a white-collar beverage. Partly because of the premium price, partly because the smaller can…Monster decided on a 16oz can – the same price for twice the volume and marketed it towards more blue-collar workers. They also focused on palatability, especially from a sweet standpoint.”

Mark Astrachan, Odd Lots podcast

That ‘Monster’ can was a focus group suggestion.

A canonical Job-to-be-done example is the McDonald’s milkshake. The five-minute clip of Clayton Christensen is worth watching and the explanation probably mimics hiring Monster. It’s sweet and caffeinated. It’s large, so it lasts. It also means something to the consumers. Here’s a Google Trends map from January 2023.

There’s something about Pennsylvania through West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennesse, Arkansas up through Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin consumers. Monster Energy tapped ‘that thing’.

📚

Related: Bitter Brew tells the story of Anheuser-Busch’s history. For God, Country, and Coca-Cola tells the story of Coke and highlights the importance of distribution advantages as Coke employees were the rear guard of the Allied forces marching across Europe in 1945.

The birthday cake’s JTBD

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One question within jobs to be done is: Are the consumer and the customer different? 

A manager who buys software or uniforms or food for their staff is the customer whereas the staff is the consumer. And this happens a lot. 

Homeowners use thermostats but HVAC companies buy them. About one-fifth of books sold are gifts. Physicians choose the medicines that patients take. And then there is the birthday cake. 

“We aren’t making nearly as many of our decorated cakes as we used to. When we do, it’s a half sheet instead of a full sheet or even nine-inch cakes. In our Chicago industry, we’ve seen a drop in decorative cakes mostly from the people who are in their twenties and thirties who don’t want to buy the same things for their kids that they got when they were kids. They want ice cream cakes or experiential things instead of having a birthday cake at home.”  – Ken Jarosch, Odd Lots, December 2022

If the customer and consumer aren’t aligned then a business gets what Bob Moesta calls “zombie revenue”. 

Gyms run on zombie revenue because the customer, the current me, is different from the consumer, the future me. 

Products are not: build it and they will come. There’s much more why, how, and when – even at a kid’s birthday party. 

…

Birthdays are common posts around here: The Birthday Cake Diet and The Birthday Bet.

NBA’s broadcast innovation dilemma

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Disruption theory (2:00 minute YouTube HBR explainer) describes how leading companies serve their customers through product improvements rather than invention.

Keurig’s innovation was capsule coffee and sustains their company with ideas like Brew ID which “recommends recipes with easy step-by-step instructions.”

It’s an innovation dilemma because sustaining innovations makes the money printers go brrr, like at ESPN.

These sustaining innovations fail when the customer Jobs-to-be-done changes.

“We started doing it for free,” Nate Duncan said on Wharton Moneyball in December 2022 about his NBA Strategy Stream show, “with the idea of eventually doing something like this back in the 2016/2017 season. We did it pretty much unpaid – our Patreon subscribers would throw us a few bucks but they weren’t obligated to – and we just built up a lot of reps doing it in the bad old days.”

Think about that. Duncan and his partner Danny Leroux worked “pretty much unpaid” to broadcast NBA games.

But they found an audience. They found an adapting JTBD.

Disruption theory also describes how leading companies can create both sustaining and disruptive innovations. One aspect is a separate P/L. But that takes financial, temporal, and status capital. Within any organization, what executive is going to suggest an unprofitable bet to create something people might want? No way.

But that’s disruption theory.

Should you build *magic*?

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When talking about Jobs To Be Done, Bob Moesta notes that there are two ways to innovate. Supply-side innovation is internally driven. Organizations know their capabilities, limitations, and business model and build from that position. This type of innovation is more efficient, has limited scope (and costs!), and uses the language of the organization.

Alternatively, demand-side innovation is externally driven. Jobs theory is demand side as is the Mom Test and IDEO’s invention through iteration. This type of innovation includes prototypes and feedback, lots of questions, and uses the language of the customers and consumers. 

“Any sufficiently advanced technology,” Arthur C. Clarke wrote in 1962, “is indistinguishable from magic”. 

That quote highlights this aspect. Technology users want it to feel like magic. Builders use advanced technologies.

Face ID is magic. 

“What Apple did with Face ID was take a really hard computer science problem, and using a lot of complicated technology, create something with a simple name. I intuitively know what Face ID is just from the name. It’s also intuitive to use. I looked at it and was in. There’s an opportunity to do something like that (for crypto). Multiparty computation is not the right marketing term for what the average person might use.”

Brian Armstrong to Ben Horowitz. 

Uber is magic. 

“At first glance Uber might just look like a simple app—after all, the premise was always to hit a button and get a ride. But underneath its deceptively basic user interface was a complex, global operation required to sustain the business. The app sat on a vast worldwide network of smaller networks, each one representing cities and countries. Each of these networks had to be started, scaled, and defended against competitors, at all hours of the day.”

Andrew Chen, The Cold Start Problem.

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The wrong lesson here is to think customers want magic. It’s situational! Shopping and buying are different. 

There is no best way to innovate, only trade offs. But Clarke gives us a nice framing for technology.

ESPN’s innovation dilemma

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One pant leg on is a local maximum. One problem is solved but the larger set is not.

Clayton Christensen’s series on disruption and innovation is about local maximums.

Money machine go brrr is a strong incentive to keep printing. Maximizing a profitable business makes sense, which is the dilemma! Organizations find themselves looking good in one pant leg.

The solution to local maximums is exploration. But this is costly – money, status (uh oh), time, reputation. Plus the stakeholder’s opinions.

The solution, Clayton Christensen writes, is separation. Different groups with different strategies, finances, and when possible physical locations.

Solutions via exploration are important because customer and consumer preferences – their JTBD – change.

“We are all under the Disney umbrella,” Brian Burke said, “ESPN.com is a huge enterprise with an army of people and is a revenue generator in so many ways. It’s difficult to change course. FiveThirtyEight is agile, nimble, and experimental so (publishing there) was a great opportunity”.

ESPN.com go brrr.

Which is the dilemma, and Disney/ESPN uses FiveThirtyEight as the exploration solution. Who knows if Burke’s writing approach is better, but the publishing strategy is a solution to the innovator’s dilemma.

“The next ESPN.com” will be different. Whatever is next will have a different business model than the current Great Firms (Christensen’s subtitle). Whatever is next will have a different maximum. It will be a short vertical video or the degradation of the sport monoculture or something we can’t predict today.

Or even an analytic forward analysis from Brian Burke.

Kinko’s JTBD

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When asked if he worried about Xerox vertically integrating, Kinko’s founder Pual Orfalea said ‘HAAHAHAHAH. No.’

It’s obvious with distance, hindsight, and present best practices that’s exactly what Xerox should have done. Move down the market, get closer to the customers, and let their purchase decisions drive product innovation. But Paul Orfalea just laughed.

And he’s right.

Xerox couldn’t have acquired Kinko’s because Xerox and Kinkos are two different businesses.

“We aren’t in the copy business. We are in the emotions business. We help people get jobs, make sales brochures, and celebrate the major moments of their lives.” – Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko’s

People don’t want quarter-inch holes, the expression goes, they want to hang their damn vacation photos.

Orfalea figured that out and designed his organization around the idea. He empowered counterworkers to solve problems immediately. When customers came in worked up and stressed out about an errored order, the last they thing want to hear is ‘let me talk to my manager and see what we can do.’ No! An immediate refund and rushed redo was the solution, and it’s what Kinko’s did.

“Our customers didn’t particularly care how the work got done either,” Paul writes in Copy This,” But they cared passionately about obtaining relief, symbolized by the finished product.

Job to be done is a great theory for product development but it only works holistically. The Panera job is food and place. If either is ‘a mess’ then neither works. The things have to fit together as homeotelic systems. Actions A and B work toward the same goal.

Kudos to Kinko’s and Xerox for using the Rich Barton “Scrabble Letter” naming system. Orfalea credits the name of Kinko’s to his kinky hair and his mom noting that people don’t forget hard consonants, as our first is GooGoo Gaga.

Circuit Breaker Substack

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“There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.”

Andy Grove

Bob Moesta has one of the most impactful perspectives on achieving more, and on his podcast with Greg Engel discusses how to make better products, better services, and more successes.

Their Circuit Breaker podcast covers:

  • how and why to unpack jargon: our loyal customers will buy this innovative healthy snack
  • that your product is the mustard on the sandwich in the customer’s lives
  • big hires and little hires

And more.

The Circuit Breaker Podcast Substack is my tribute to the show. Subscribe for a certain job. But first…

The LEGO company is one of the most successful organizations ever. Spanning nearly one hundred years, war, factory fires (three!), expansions and depressions, currency conversions, and Nintendo et. al. the toy company has survived and thrived.

Throughout LEGO’s history, there’s always been a manager who thought: the toy is great and people will find out. Let them come.

Throughout LEGO’s history, there’s also been a manager who knows: we have to sell this thing. We go to them.

People were busy, people are busy, and people will always be busy.

That’s the job of the email: subscribe because you are busy and you want a reminder about last week’s episode, further details, and more JTBD goodies.

Open 24 Hours

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What do you want? is the wrong question.

Customers speak in the language of problems.
Businesses speak in the language of solutions.

When Netflix asked customers what they wanted, the customers said more new releases. So Netflix bought more. Then they looked at the data.

Engineers compared churn rates for customers who got new movies quickly with those who didn’t and the results were indistinguishable.

What customers wanted were faster movies. If customers got a movie within a few days of returning the previous they were less likely to churn out than customers who had to wait longer. Bingo. Netflix’s solution wasn’t more new releases, it was shorter shipping times.

Good for Netflix – but what about us? What about businesses that don’t have data engineers?

“From 1984 to about 1987, I proselytized about the wisdom of staying open for 24 hours,” Paul Orfalea writes in Copy This. Orfalea was a unique manager.

Rather than spending time at the office, Orfalea was on the road talking to Kinko’s partners, customers, and anyone who found something that worked.

“I’d met a convenience store owner who found his overall sales jumped 50 percent when he decided to stay open for 24 hours. At first, the increase seemed like a mystery. His foot traffic wasn’t great during the overnight hours. But his customers liked knowing they could patronize his stores any time day or night. They never had to worry when he was open or closed.”

Bingo.

Kinko’s business wasn’t selling copies – it was managing emotions. Customers needed help. Kinko’s helped them get jobs, celebrate moments, or create the brochure that needed done yesterday. Being open 24 hours helped.

Black Friday JTBD

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JTBD (vacuums, meals, multitools) exists to find the implicit motivator. Humans stink at admitting, acknowledging, and understanding the scope of our motivations. JTBD finds gaps between those shortcomings and the lived results.

“I’m going to go Black Friday shopping,” Krista told me, “as an excuse to get lunch with my girlfriend.”

It seems like shopping is shopping – but one distinction is experience or convenience. Are we doing something to get it done or doing something to have done it? Shopping as an excuse to get lunch is a different job than shopping for deals.

Happy Black Friday.