You will be able to use the jobs to be done idea to find what your customer is really trying to achieve.
Ask a parent why they signed their daughter up for maths tuition and they will probably say "to improve her grades". Ask them what was happening at home the week they started looking, and you get a different story, where homework every night ended in tears and dinner was tense. The parent had tried to explain long division and realised they had forgotten how it was taught. Better grades were part of it. What they wanted most was for the evenings to stop being a fight.
That second answer is far more useful to a marketer, and there is a well-known idea that helps you find it.
The late Harvard professor Clayton Christensen popularised an idea called jobs to be done. It says that people don't simply buy products. They hire them to make progress in a particular situation, and they fire them when something else does the job better.
The word "hire" is the useful part. It makes you ask what the customer was trying to get done, and in what circumstances, rather than who they are or what features they wanted. The same product can be hired for very different jobs. A plate of chicken rice from a hawker stall might be hired for a fast, cheap lunch before a 1pm meeting. The same plate, bought as a takeaway for an elderly parent, is hired to make sure they eat something proper today. The first customer cares about the queue, while the second cares about whether the rice will still be warm after a bus ride.
Go back to the parent. If you think the job is "better grades", you market results: marks, distinctions, top scorers. That is what most tuition centres do, so the message blends in.
If the job is "calm at home and less arguing over homework", the marketing changes. You talk about children who come home having already done their homework at the centre. You mention that the tutor explains methods the way the school teaches them, so the parent doesn't have to. You might send a short weekly note so the parent knows what was covered without having to ask a reluctant child. None of that is about grades, yet all of it speaks to what the parent was struggling with when they started looking.
Grades still matter. The point is that the job usually includes more than the obvious outcome, and the parts people don't say out loud are often the parts that decide which centre they pick.
Once you know the job, you can list what else the customer might hire to do it, and the list is usually longer than owners expect.
For the parent who wants calmer evenings, the alternatives include other tuition centres, but also a private home tutor, a free YouTube channel that explains primary maths, an older cousin who helps on Sundays, a stack of assessment books from the bookshop, or simply doing nothing and hoping the child grows out of it. Doing nothing is one of the most common choices, and it is a real competitor. If your marketing never explains why waiting is worse than acting, many of the people who notice your ads will still choose to wait.
You will need this list in lesson 3.3, which builds your positioning on these alternatives. You can't position against alternatives you haven't noticed, and the job is how you notice them.
You don't find the job by asking customers what they want. Most people answer that question with features: smaller classes, cheaper fees, a location closer to home. You find it by asking about the moment they decided to look.
With recent customers, ask questions like these. What was happening when you first started looking for something like us? What had you tried before? What made you decide it couldn't wait any longer? What nearly stopped you? Then listen for the situation, the frustration and the progress they were hoping for.
Priya, who runs a maths centre in Tampines, did this with six parents who had enrolled in the past term. Four of them mentioned evenings at home before they mentioned grades. Two said the final push was a teacher's comment at a parent-teacher meeting. Neither detail appeared anywhere in her marketing. Both now appear in her posts.
A useful way to write a job down is as a single sentence: when I am in this situation, I want to make this progress, so I can get this result. For one of Priya's parents, it reads: when homework time turns into an argument every night, I want someone else to take over the maths, so I can have a normal evening with my child.
The activity below asks you to write that sentence for your own product. Base it on a real conversation if you can, and use the words the customer actually used, even if they sound less polished than yours.
Write the job your product is hired for in the form: when I am in this situation, I want to make this progress, so I can get this result.
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