After our voyage into the mad world of grocery apps, let’s get back to building out our product marketing frameworks...
As you know, the first step towards building your product marketing plan is better understanding your customer.
There’s a bunch of ways to go about this but two common approaches for framing/viewing your customers - that are sometimes pitted against each other- are User Personas and Jobs to be Done.
Right now, it’s quite trendy to be talking about Jobs to be Done, with persona-based marketing perceived as being somewhat old school. See this Twitter thread for an example...
But, for product marketers, I believe you can’t have one without the other. So I‘ll try to make the case for that today.
What is Jobs to be Done?
Jobs to be Done is an interesting way of thinking about your customers. Instead of asking who your customer is, it looks at the question: What is someone trying to achieve when they use your product?
The textbook example is Clay Christensen and his work with McDonalds, where a team of researchers discovered the real reason people were buying milkshakes. Clay’s team found that half of people who bought milkshakes were purchasing them in the morning, that it was usually the only product they ordered, and that they would drive off as soon as they’d bought their shake.
When asked about why they were buying these morning shakes, the customers answered that no other snack could match a McDonald’s milkshake when it came to keeping them company on their morning commutes. The ‘Job to be Done’ for the milkshake was keeping these people engaged with life as they embarked on a long, boring drive to work.
This was an incredibly useful insight for a number of reasons.
McDonalds realised their competition wasn’t just other milkshake sellers, or even other drinks. It was anything that might be a satisfying accompaniment to a morning commute, be it bananas, doughnuts, bagels, or chocolate bars. It meant the Total Addressable Market was significantly bigger than previously predicted. Plus, it gave a ton of inspiration for how milkshakes could be marketed, and how new products could be developed.
So by asking your customers what the ‘job’ is that they’re trying to do when they use your product, you’ll find a fresh perspective that you wouldn’t get from conventional user interviews.
If you’re interested in how JTBD can be used specifically by Marketing teams, I recommend watching Matt Hodges talk through how he approached it at Intercom.
What are User Personas?
User Personas are a well established way of understanding and picturing your customer. Using quantitive and qualitative analysis, you can bucket your customers into different categories based on the traits they have in common, and create fake profiles that reflect these groups.
There’s a ton of ways you can format it, some of them cheesier than others. But it’s this sort of thing.
High End Howard
Age: 51-65
Reads: The FT, Economist
Occupation: Financial services
Brands: Bentley, Rolex
Motivation: Cash, Money, Exuberant Wealth
Goals: Showing off to his mates
Challenges: Keeping his waistline down
Ok, I feel a bit bad about poor old Howard and the stereotype I’ve created there. And here lies some of the problem with this form of user insight, as it does lend itself easily to cliches and lazy thinking.
So the key thing to nail with User Personas is making them genuinely useful and actionable. Think about what it is you actually want to know about your customer when you’re creating profiles.
Often, basic variables like age and gender won’t be relevant to your marketing strategy so leave them out. Focus on the things that are going to help your wider marketing team do their jobs. For example, finding out which social apps a Persona uses would help your Demand Generation team allocate spend.
Why do we need them both?
My view is that Jobs to be Done and User Personas are the perfect pairing when it comes to better understanding your customer.
While JTBD will give you a fresh perspective that flips your perceptions of your customers on its head, the findings can sometimes be rather abstract. And we’re not all geniuses like Clay Christensen who can join the dots in such a meaningful way.
User Personas has its flaws, but can bring your insights to life in a way that JTBD might not be able to. Personas are useful both for helping you picture your actual user, and reminding yourself that there is a real human being at the other end of your marketing efforts, but also for providing the actionable insights that your wider marketing can use i.e. What kind of content topics are they interested in? Which cities should we be running our next out-of-home campaign in?
So why not combine the two? Establish your Top 3 persona profiles and then work out the Job to be Done for each of those cohorts. There’s a good chance each group will be trying to achieve something slightly different when they’re using your product.
If you aren’t familiar with Jobs to be Done or Users Personas, and want to talk about getting these set up for your company, I’m always around for a chat. Just hit reply on this email.
See y’all next week. 👋