Asking the Right Questions of the Right Audience in Jobs-to-be-Done Research

Practical Jobs-to-be-Done Series

One of the first distinctions I personally noticed about Jobs-to-be-Done is that it avoids hypotheticals. Marketing researchers tend to use hypotheticals a lot and doing so gives them false confidence when trying to predict the behavior of customers (or in this case hypothetical potential customers). The questions could be related to product preferences, features trade-offs, preferred channel, etc. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter.

I’m going to set product innovation research aside for the time being and focus on something as simple as channel preference for an electronic product (product type distinctions are important). I’m going set up two simple survey scenarios that are related to the purchase journey. Let’s take a look at how the results can be different.

First, let’s take a look at a common marketing series:

Audience: 1500 general consumers - ~20% said are thinking about buying an electronic widget in the next 12 months; but no quotas

Q1: If you were to purchase an e…