We’re lost, but we’re making good time! —Yogi Berra (Location 26)
Tags: pink
You have to understand the job the customer is trying to do in a specific circumstance. If the company simply tried to average all the responses of the dads and the commuters, it would come up with a one-size-fits-none product that doesn’t do either of the jobs well. (Location 297)
Tags: pink
Inspired by our milk shake insights, my daughter Ann and I sat in our kitchen thinking about what job we might hire margarine to do. In our case, it was often hired to wet the popcorn just enough for the salt to stick. But not nearly as well as the better-tasting butter. So we headed into the field to our local Star Market to see if we could learn more about why people buy this substitute for butter. We were immediately struck by the overwhelming variety of products available. There were something like twenty-one different brands of margarine right next to its nemesis, butter. We thought we understood the basic benefits of margarine: with its lower fat content, it might have been considered healthier at the time.2 And it was cheaper than butter. Yes, those twenty-one options were slightly different, but those differences seemed focused only on improving an attribute—percentage of fat—that was irrelevant to any job we would hire margarine to do. (Location 317)
Imagine, for example, writing a résumé for every competing product. Butter—the product that we originally thought was margarine’s prime competitor—might be hired to flavor food. But it’s not always margarine’s competitor. You can also write a résumé for Teflon. For olive oil. For mayonnaise. People might hire the same product to do different jobs at different times in their lives—much like the milk shake. Unilever might have had a large share of what marketers have defined as the yellow fats business, but no customer walks into the store saying, “I need to buy something in the yellow fats category.” They come in with a specific Job to Be Done. (Location 338)
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I have no doubt that the Unilever executives in the room that day were seasoned, sophisticated leaders. But their tepid response made me wonder how many companies are operating within such fixed assumptions about how to think about innovation that it’s difficult to step back and assess whether they’re even asking the right questions. Executives are inundated with data about their products. They know market share to the nth degree, how products are selling in different markets, profit margin across hundreds of different items, and so on. But all this data is focused around customers and the product itself—not how well the product is solving customers’ jobs. Even customer satisfaction metrics, which reveal whether a customer is happy with a product or not, don’t give any clues as to how to do the job better. Yet it’s how most companies track and measure success. (Location 351)
By the end of 2014 Unilever announced its intention to separate its struggling spreads division into a stand-alone company to help stabilize sales in a business that had become a drag on overall growth as margarine fell out of favor with shoppers. By early 2016 the head of Unilever’s margarine group was replaced and speculation about Unilever’s future in the margarine business was renewed. By contrast, the global olive oil market is one of the fastest growing in the food industry. Unilever is a world-class company that’s done a lot of things right in the past two decades. But I can’t help but wonder how a different lens on the competitive landscape may have altered Unilever’s path. (Location 364)
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part of the problem is that we’re missing the right vocabulary to talk about innovation in ways that help us understand what actually causes it to succeed. Innovators are left to mix, match, and often misapply inadequate concepts and terminology designed for other purposes. We’re awash in data, frameworks, customer categories, and performance metrics intended for other purposes on the assumption that they’re helpful for innovation, too. (Location 371)
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. Creating the right experiences and then integrating around them to solve a job, is critical for competitive advantage. That’s because while it may be easy for competitors to copy products, it’s difficult for them to copy experiences that are well integrated into your company’s processes. But to do all this well takes a holistic effort—from the original insight that led to the identification of the job all the way through to the product finding its way into the hands of a consumer—involving the decisions and influence of virtually everyone in the company. (Location 408)