What is the Jobs to Be Done Theory, and How Can Arts Organizations Use It?
How can your organization build upon its current audience with new and loyal patrons? Advisory Board for the Arts is asking and answering this exact question with its latest research to be delivered at our virtual member-only summit starting October 29. A central concept behind the research is the idea of understanding the audience or customer ‘job to be done.’
Why do we talk about a customer ‘job to be done’?
“Jobs To Be Done” (JTBD) is a term coined by the late Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School. To best explain the ideology behind JTBD, we turn to an unlikely place - the perfect milkshake.
Years ago, Christensen was working with a fast food restaurant chain on how to sell more milkshakes. They had started with the typical route, changing features of the milkshake to interest new customers. They tried making it thicker or smoother, changing toppings, introducing new flavors, adding more chocolate - the list goes on. Despite these changes, sales did not meaningfully change.
Clay and his team set out to understand the novel questions of when, why, and to whom milkshakes were being sold. What they found surprised them: the overwhelming majority of milkshakes customers were men, and more often than not sales happened in the morning. To understand this unusual finding, instead of asking customers what they wanted in a milkshake, they asked an unexpected question: what job did you hire the milkshake to do for you?
When they phrased questions around the job the customer was looking to ‘hire’ the milkshake for, they found an unusual answer: milkshakes were a companion on the long commute to work.
Unlike a bagel, donut, or scone, milkshakes make no mess in the car on a long drive. They are easy to hold with one hand while the other drives the vehicle, and they are thick enough to last longer than a coffee, juice, or soda.
Once they understood the customer’s job, they were able to make changes to the product and purchase experience to help support the job - they created flavors more appropriate for breakfast, and added fruit pieces. They made sure to keep the product thick enough to last a while going through a straw.
What JTBD allowed the fast-food chain to do was break out of the traditional demographic targeting they had become accustomed to and think more expansively about competitors and customer needs.
Christensen explained the concept in an article for Harvard Business School. "The fact that you're 18 to 35 years old with a college degree does not cause you to buy a product," Christensen says. "It may be correlated with the decision, but it doesn't cause it. We developed this idea because we wanted to understand what causes us to buy a product, not what's correlated with it. We realized that the causal mechanism behind a purchase is, 'Oh, I've got a job to be done.' And it turns out that it's really effective in allowing a company to build products that people want to buy."
See Clay Christensen describe the process in this video for more.
ABA uses JTBD to help arts organizations find new audiences
In early 2020, ABA led a series of in-depth interviews with performing arts attendees using the jobs-to-be-done methodology. This allowed us to find the latent motivations behind performing arts purchases to unlock new ways to target, attract and retain new, loyal audiences. (see images for some of the interview subjects, pseudonymed, and the initial jobs we found).
Once identified, the research team constructed a survey to send to thousands of patrons from the ABA membership. They then worked with HaystaqDNA, pioneers of the field of predictive analytics, to understand how those motivations cluster to form potential segments.
Here are examples of individuals from the jobs-to-be-done arts interviews. For Min, the job of the arts ticket is to support her community and cultural institutions, while Ilse wants a transformative experience.
ABA is currently finalizing the analysis and writing up examples of arts organizations using this methodology for our member-only virtual summit. In addition, members who provided audience lists to participate in the survey will also receive specific data about their audience jobs-to-be-done. After presenting these insights, ABA will support the implementation of the best-practices through workshops, diagnostics and guides.
So, how can a milkshake help you find new, loyal audiences?
Targeting behavioral segments
Creating compelling messaging for non-traditional audiences
Modifying or transforming the experience to appeal to new segments
Additional Examples
Milkshakes are just one example of JTBD, but this principle can and has been used for years to find answers for problems in unlikely places. Read on for three additional examples of JTBD:
Case Study: Form Theatricals
In theatre Anthony Francavilla, former manager and producer for a theater and founder of Form Theatricals, utilizes JTBD to get into the mind of theatre goers. After consulting an ethnographic interview specialist, Anthony began to realize that the key to gaining insights on JTBD was by asking specific questions.
“Studying what customers consider as competition helps you reveal what pushes them to change”
In a children’s theatre, Anthony asked parents what the alternatives were to seeing a play. Options such as LEGO video games or joining the Girl Scouts were mentioned; the wide variety of alternatives showed Anthony that the parents’ job is to teach their children independence and teamwork.
The result? The children’s theatre altered the storyline of the play to show how the hero and their fellow characters work together to solve a problem. This change provided the foundation for a productive conversation as a family after seeing the play. Read more about this JTBD story here.
Case Study: LinkedIn Gets Jobs to be Done
Have you ever considered premium LinkedIn? Alan Klement, writer and JTBD aficionado, discusses how ‘LinkedIn Gets Jobs to be Done’ in his article highlighting the four options to help recommend the best Premium plan for him. See image for the four Jobs LinkedIn presents all premium customers with to provide pricing plans and features.
Case Study: Jobs in Schools
Analysis of the progress in teaching is possible using the JTBD model. Thomas Arnett, Bob Moesta, and Michael B. Horn interviewed teachers who recently shifted instructional practices for their students, and the conversations uncovered four Jobs. Below are the Jobs taken verbatim from ‘The Teacher’s Quest for Progress’:
Help me lead the way in improving my school
Help me engage and challenge more of my students
Help me replace a broken instructional model so I can reach each student
Help me to not fall behind on my school’s new initiative