Use the jobs to be done idea to find out what your customer is trying to achieve.
People pay for a product because it helps them get something done at a specific moment in their lives. If you can name that moment and the progress they wanted, using what a real customer told you, your marketing gets clearer and your list of competitors gets more honest.
The idea behind this is called jobs to be done, and it was popularised by the late Clayton Christensen, who was a professor at Harvard. His view was that customers don't simply buy things. They bring a product in to make progress in a particular situation, and they drop it when another option does the job better.
Christensen's choice of the word hire is what makes the idea practical. Hiring, in his sense, means picking a product to get a specific job done in a specific situation. When you think of a sale as a hire, your questions shift towards what the person was trying to achieve and what was going on for them at the time. Who they are, and which features they asked for, matter less.
One product can be hired for jobs that have little in common. Picture two people at the same chicken rice stall (both are invented, as are the people and figures later on). One wants a quick, inexpensive lunch because a meeting starts at 1pm, and for them the length of the queue decides everything. The other is buying a packet to take to an elderly parent, to be sure the parent has a proper meal today. That buyer is thinking about whether the rice will still be warm at the end of a bus ride.
A parent whose daughter has just started maths tuition will usually tell you the reason is "to improve her grades". Change the question to what was going on at home around the time they began searching, and you hear something else. Every night, homework ended with the child in tears, and dinners had become tense. The parent sat down to help with long division and found they no longer remembered how it was taught. More than anything, they wanted their evenings to stop being a fight.
For a marketer, that home story is worth far more than the stated reason. A centre that takes the job to be "better grades" will advertise results, such as marks, distinctions and lists of top scorers. Most tuition centres already advertise that way, so the message gets lost among theirs. A centre that sees the job as "calm at home and less arguing over homework" would produce very different material. It would describe children arriving home with their homework finished at the centre. It would point out that tutors teach methods the same way the school does, which spares the parent from doing it. It could also send a short note each week telling the parent what was covered, so they don't need to drag the details out of an unwilling child.
The parent still cares about grades. A job usually stretches beyond the obvious outcome, though, and the parts people leave unsaid are often what tips them towards one provider over another.
When you know the job, you can write down every other thing a customer could hire to get it done, and most owners are surprised by how long that list gets. A parent who wants calmer evenings could turn to:
another tuition centre a private tutor who comes to the home a free YouTube channel that explains primary maths an older cousin who helps out on Sundays a pile of assessment books bought at the bookshop nothing at all, in the hope the child grows out of it
The last option is chosen very often, and you should treat it as a competitor in its own right. People who see your ads will still hold off if nothing in your marketing shows them why waiting is worse than acting. You can only position yourself against alternatives you have spotted, and working out the job is how you spot them. Keep this list, because Lesson 3.3 uses it as the base for your positioning.
Asking customers what they want rarely uncovers the job. Most people reply with features, for example smaller classes, lower fees or a centre nearer their home. The better route is to ask about the point at which they started looking.
Arrange conversations with people who became customers recently. Ask what was happening when they first began looking for something like you, what they had already tried, what made them decide it couldn't wait any longer, and what almost held them back. While they talk, pay attention to three things: the situation they were in, what was frustrating them, and the progress they were hoping to make.
Priya, who runs a maths centre in Tampines, did this with six parents, all of whom had enrolled in the past term. Four of them brought up their evenings at home before they said anything about grades. Two told her the thing that finally pushed them was a comment from a teacher at a parent-teacher meeting. Priya's marketing had never mentioned either point, and her posts now include both.
Once you have the story, turn it into a job statement: a single sentence that runs "when I am in this situation, I want to make this progress, so I can get this result". Write it from a real conversation wherever you can, keeping the customer's own words even when they are rougher than what you would write yourself. One of Priya's parents put it like this: "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 down the job your product is hired for in this form: when I am in this situation, I want to make this progress, so I can get this result.
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