We spent decades building marketing campaigns around people’s age, gender, race, and income – as if those boxes could tell us who someone is and why they make decisions.
For a long time, it worked, or at least it appeared to. Demographics were easy to track, simple to sort, and gave us something to measure. But the truth is, demographics were always just the easiest answer, not the best one. They told us where to find people but not why they would care.
Somewhere along the way, the best marketers realized that people don’t buy products because of who they are; they buy them because of what they’re trying to get done. They have jobs to be done. They have frustrations to resolve, aspirations to reach, constraints to overcome. People don’t buy drills because they are 35-year-old suburban males. They buy drills because they need to make a hole. And sometimes they don’t even want a hole. What they want is the picture hung up, the shelf installed, the feeling of accomplishment, the Saturday project completed without having to call for help. That’s the job they are hiring for. That’s the story they are living in.
This way of thinking flips everything. It forces us to stop assuming we know people just because we know their age or postal code. It pushes us to study what people are actually trying to solve. Two people of different ages, cultures, and backgrounds might hire the same product for the same job but for entirely different emotional reasons. And two people who look identical on paper might be solving wildly different problems. It’s a messy, beautiful, more human view of the world.
It’s not surprising that the shift from demographics to Jobs to Be Done has gained momentum at a time when customers are harder to pigeonhole than ever. Traditional life stages have been obliterated. A 60-year-old may now be a first-time entrepreneur, a gamer, or starting a new family. A 25-year-old may be saving for retirement, raising a child, or living nomadically without any fixed address. Age no longer dictates behavior. Technology no longer belongs to the young. Financial security doesn’t follow a linear path. Demographics are no longer a map; at best, they are background noise.
The more we try to guess what people want based on these old labels, the more we get it wrong. This is why so many campaigns fall flat. They talk to a profile instead of a person. They target what people are, not what people need. They chase attention instead of solving problems. It’s why brands struggle to hold loyalty – they are building for categories, not for causes.
When we focus on jobs, we start asking better questions. What’s the progress the customer is trying to make? What’s getting in their way? What does success look like to them? What will they fire their current solution for? These questions strip away assumptions and get to the heart of decision-making. They reveal not just the functional needs, but the emotional and social drivers that sit quietly underneath.
This is how you realize that a fancy new stroller isn’t just about carrying a baby – it’s about a parent’s need to feel competent and in control while navigating their new life. This is how you see that a fitness app isn’t just about counting steps, it’s about a user hiring the app to feel a sense of self-discipline and to signal progress to themselves and others. It’s never just about the product. It’s always about the progress.
I first encountered this powerful way of thinking during my MBA, through a case study that has stayed with me to this day: the milkshake experiment. It’s a simple but unforgettable story that illustrates everything Jobs to Be Done is about. Researchers wanted to help a fast-food chain increase milkshake sales. At first, they tried the usual demographic segmentation – who is buying the milkshake? When? What are their ages? Nothing worked. The insights went nowhere. But when the researchers asked a different question – what job are people hiring this milkshake to do? – they uncovered something brilliant. Most of the milkshakes were bought early in the morning by commuters who had a long, boring drive ahead. The milkshake wasn’t just a drink – it was hired to keep them engaged, to last through the commute, to be easy to consume with one hand. The milkshake was a morning companion. That’s the job it was doing. And suddenly, the entire marketing and product design strategy changed.
This story, introduced to me in an MBA classroom years ago, has stayed with me – not just as a business lesson, but as a leadership one. It taught me to question how often we settle for the surface-level answer when the real story sits just beneath. The milkshake experiment became a gateway to the broader Jobs to Be Done theory, which was popularized by Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor known for his groundbreaking work on disruptive innovation. His book Competing Against Luck cemented the JTBD framework in business thinking, showing that understanding the job – not the customer profile – is what drives successful innovation.
Interestingly, while thinkers like Alex Osterwalder (who introduced the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas) also touch on customer jobs, his work is more tool-driven, focusing on business design and visual modeling. JTBD, on the other hand, is a deeper behavioral theory that challenges us to understand causality – the why behind customer decisions. Christensen’s work, along with contributors like Tony Ulwick and Bob Moesta, pushed us to move beyond neat demographics and toward messy, human, richly detailed stories about the progress people are struggling to make in their lives.
The magic of Jobs to Be Done is that it cuts across demographics, markets, and even cultures. It finds common ground where surface-level categories cannot. It focuses on the story the customer is trying to write about themselves. It focuses on their struggle, their progress, their transformation.
But it’s not the easy path. It doesn’t give you pre-packaged reports or plug-and-play targeting. You have to do the work. You have to talk to people, listen without bias, and decode their language of struggle. You have to observe behavior, not just collect data. You have to build products that do the job, not just look good in a pitch deck. And you have to design marketing that speaks to the job, not to the demographic checklist.
This is why the best brands don’t sound like they are speaking to a category. They sound like they are speaking to you. They sound like they see you. Because they’ve stopped chasing your labels and started solving your problem.
Of course, the old ways still persist. Demographics are still widely used because they’re easy to sell to bosses and easy to plug into ad platforms. They scale quickly. They fit neatly into dashboards. But what’s easy to measure is not always what’s worth measuring. And what’s easy to chase is not always what earns trust.
There’s something deeply human about stepping back and realizing that the people we’re trying to reach are not our segments – they are people with complex lives, quiet struggles, and a constant desire to make progress. They don’t care about your categories. They care about whether you can help them.
The brands that win are the ones that figure this out. The ones that get curious enough to stop asking “who” and start asking “why.” The ones that understand that the future of marketing doesn’t belong to those who shout the loudest to the widest audience – it belongs to those who solve the right problem for the right person at the right time.
That’s what they hire you for.