A milkshake does sound really good…
How can milkshakes be a marketing tool? Let’s talk about it in today’s episode!
This month I am plugging Ranken Jordan Pediatric Hospital. To donate, please visit https://rankenjordanfoundation.org/donate/
SOURCES:
https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/3-keys-to-understanding-jobs-to-be-done
https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/jobs-to-be-done-examples
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
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TRANSCRIPT:
So probably about 7 or 8 years ago, I attended a research summit where the organizers had gotten a lot of big names from what I’ll call the “business book club” scene together. I don’t remember the exact lineup, but I know over two different conferences, they had folks like Stephen Dubner, the author of Freakonomics, Malcom Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point and Blink, and Michael Lewis, the author of many great books including The Big Short, Moneyball and The Blind Side.
And then out walks Clayton Christensen, introduced as “The guy who literally wrote the book on disruption.” About half the people in the room knew exactly what that meant, and the other half were, I suspect, surprised when he launched into talking about some research he’d done for McDonald’s on how they could sell some more milkshakes.
So, let me back up for a moment. Clayton Christensen, who sadly passed away in 2020, wrote this book back in the late 1990s called The Innovator’s Dilemma, and in it, he coined the phrase “disruptive innovation.” If you haven’t read the book – and you should! – it studies the phenomenon of companies that seem too big to fail suddenly dramatically failing because they didn’t keep up with the value to innovation curve, which he says is shaped like an S.
So let’s say you create some new technology or method of doing things and you bring it to market. You spend a lot at first and even lose money as your new idea takes root, but then it grows dramatically before tapering off at the top and even starting to decline again after its peak. What’s ultimately going to happen is you’re going to reach a point where your new idea isn’t innovative anymore, and you’re going to be vulnerable to something new coming out of seemingly nowhere and replacing it.
The greatest value occurs in the middle of that S when your investment pays off and growth is still happening. That’s actually a pretty good place to sell your idea off for a huge profit and move on to something else, but as you might guess, that’s not how businesses tend to operate.
The problem, he argues in the book, is that the competitive marketplace doesn’t innovate. It iterates. And that’s why these new ideas will seem to come out of nowhere and knock everyone down. That’s what disruption truly is – not making something that already exists better, but making it irrelevant with a new idea that changes the marketplace forever.
Everyone wants to be the disruptor because there’s a lot of money in it, but as Christensen wrote multiple books on innovation and disruption following this one, it became pretty clear that a lot of innovative ideas never make it to the disruptive stage. They have to be the right idea at the right time and in the right place with the right funding to strike like lightning and truly disrupt the market.
I know, I know, I just gave you a crash course on the entire philosophy of Silicon Valley, right? They love this book there. But stick with me. We’ve still got to talk about McDonald’s milkshakes.
So Clayton Christensen started rethinking products and innovation and he realized that maybe he was missing the mechanism that made these things valuable in the first place.
And so he introduced a new concept called the Jobs to Be Done Theory, also known as JTBD. This idea posits that consumers “hire” products and services to complete “jobs” that need to be done for them. But these jobs are often not obvious and don’t represent what the product or service might be positioned to offer.
So for example, a diamond ring might be positioned as a beautiful piece of jewelry that someone can wear to look nice. But the reason someone might purchase it is as a gift to someone else to establish the promise of a committed partnership – you know, like proposing marriage. The ring’s job isn’t to look pretty. It’s to say, “be mine.”
So, what do you think the job of a McDonald’s milkshake might be? The answer might surprise you.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
I’m a researcher, and I love to try to understand why people do the things they do. A lot of my time is spent reading and thinking about data and seeing how they apply to the world around us. But so often, the best insights don’t come from surveys or focus groups or interviews where I’m asking questions and people are answering them.
They come from observing the world around me and asking, “why the heck do people do that?”
That may be one reason I can remember this talk from Clayton Christensen so clearly, both because he was talking about something I knew and understood – working at McDonald’s, where I was once a McManager! – and the absolutely banal activity of sitting in your car commuting to work, something I do all the time here in St. Louis.
Christensen was asked to provide some insight into a rather puzzling question – why were there people coming into McDonald’s in the morning and buying milkshakes? McDonald’s found it was a surprising number of milkshakes before lunch, and they were wondering if there was perhaps some sort of trend bubbling up where people were starting to think of milkshakes as a breakfast drink. This would be important to know because McDonald’s is sort of legendary for not having a working ice cream machine and I can tell you, as someone who had to disassemble those shake machines every night so we could clean them, it’s pretty hard to get them put back together in time for the breakfast rush.
And so Christensen and his team started to do the first step of the JTBD model, which is to observe what was happening. When they’d see someone buy a milkshake, they’d pay attention to who it was and when it was happening.
The milkshake buyers often weren’t buying breakfast food, they tended to come in before 8:30 am, they tended to be alone as they were coming into the lobby or going through the drive-through, and they tended to be well-dressed like they were heading to work.
The second step of the JTBD model is to focus on the job of the product.
The milkshakes clearly served a purpose beyond being a breakfast food, but it still wasn’t clear what.
So, Christensen’s team started stopping people and asking them why they were buying milkshakes. And over time, they learned what the true purpose of the milkshakes was.
To make the morning commute less agonizing.
These individuals were almost all people who were headed to work and who were bound to get stuck in traffic. If you’re one of those lucky few who’ve never had this experience, what tends to happen is you get bored, and as your morning energy rush kicks in, you want to do something with your hands. Some people tap on their steering wheel or bop up and down with the music on the radio.
But a lot of people reach for their drink and take a sip.
That’s good and well if you have a Big Gulp or a Yeti Cup or something big, but for a lot of folks, they run out of liquid before they get to work. And they also have another problem – all that liquid makes them have to go to the bathroom, so the last stretch of that commute can be uncomfortable.
But a milkshake is different because it’s thick and requires some effort to drink. It’s relatively pleasant to drink because it’s creamy and loaded with sugar, but it doesn’t have caffeine to make it a diuretic like tea or coffee. It’s also filling, preventing them from feeling hungry while driving. And these commuters had realized, according to Christensen, that milkshakes were just the right viscosity and size to last them the entire drive.
Their hands had something to do on that agonizing commute.
And that was the job the milkshakes were doing.
Knowing this, Christensen was able to make recommendations about how to make the process for serving milkshakes easier and better to serve these customers, including having express service for milkshake customers or making the product thicker to better serve the job of lasting a long time in the car.
But he also recognized that there were functional, social and emotional dimensions to selling these products. McDonald’s really only had control over the functional dimension of making a product work as intended. The social and emotional dimensions needed to come from the consumer, and all McDonald’s could really do was position its product to suggest it could meet those hidden needs.
And here’s the cool thing in all of this. If you are able to correctly identify the Job to Be Done in a product or service and serve that job well enough, you are able to actually avoid disruptive forces because you’re not focused on the product, but the job itself.
Let’s say commuters suddenly don’t want milkshakes because they feel they’re unhealthy. The job hasn’t changed, but the requirement for how the job is filled has. And so if you’re McDonald’s, maybe you start selling smoothies instead since they can also fulfill the job but can be positioned as a healthier alternative.
Maybe smoothies are a popular alternative, but are too difficult to make quickly and you’re losing sales because the time required to fill that job isn’t worth it to the consumers. You respond by investing in technology to make those smoothies more quickly, perhaps sacrificing customization and fresh ingredients for speed and convenience for the customers. Remember, they’re not buying the product for its finer qualities; they’re buying it for its ability to keep their hands busy during their commute.
Let’s also step back and look at McDonald’s in general. Why do people go to McDonald’s? If you said it’s for the food, it’s because you’re one of those rare folks like my middle school aged son who has a taste for the stuff. But no. The food is not really why people go to McDonald’s, and anyone who’s worked there and studied under the operations manual knows that.
McDonald’s has a standard called QSC&V – Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value, and that’s the experience that they want to provide – offering quality products in a manner that’s safe, friendly, consistent and inexpensive. I’d also add speedy on there, because McDonald’s also prioritizes speed and convenience in their service design, going all the way back to their original model.
So the real job McDonald’s is filling is not to serve food. It’s to provide a consistent experience that people can trust to feed their families with food that may not be the greatest, but which is good enough for now, especially when they’re on the go or too tired to make dinner.
And so now I’m going to turn this to you and ask – what are the jobs your favorite brands or products are filling in your life? Don’t just go for the surface answers. Think deeply about this.
You may be surprised to realize how much a simple bar of soap or roll of paper towels or smartphone app or pair of headphones are doing for you every day.
And I’ll bet you never even bothered to tell them thank you!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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