Your Museum Is for Hire [Part 1]
Why consumers “hire” products to help them make progress toward their goals.
Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a theory that aims to understand why consumers* buy and use products and services. The fundamental premise of JTBD is that consumers don’t buy products, they hire a product to do a particular job. This unique way of describing a purchase forces experience designers, marketers, membership managers, and organizational leaders to focus attention on the more meaningful motives behind consumer behavior.
The shorthand explanation for JTBD is that “People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”** However, this explanation stops short of describing the underlying motivation for why someone might want a hole in their wall in the first place. In actuality, what people really want is to be able to hang a picture on their wall. Or, going a step further, what people really want is a home that reflects their personal identity, produces a sense of wellbeing, and creates a gathering place for family and friends—and decorating helps them to accomplish this goal.
JTBD helps us to gain insight into the positive change people want in their life. And it is this progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance that underscores the job to be done[1]. Thus, museums should focus on helping audiences make progress toward their desired positive change. Let’s look at an example from the museum space: membership. On the surface, the purpose of membership as a product is pretty simple: give visitors any-time access to the museum’s content. Yet, there’s an opportunity to design membership to better meet specific customer needs and, in turn, grow membership revenue and improve member retention. What if membership could be designed in a way that helps audiences get a specific job done? Could museums create a membership program that helps people do the job of getting outside their comfort zone, feeling like they’re a good parent, or emotionally recharging? How would such an approach change the way membership is promoted? What if we found out that certain customers would be willing to pay more for membership if it was aligned with a specific job? Can you imagine a membership model that incentivized more frequent participation by paying members to visit? To be successful, the JTBD framework requires that museums take a needs-based approach to audience development, including strategic investment in research to uncover unmet needs and the desire to experiment with new business models. Next week, in Part 2 of “Your Museum Is for Hire”, we’ll explore the key questions that JBTD seeks to answer and the methods for gathering customer insights to inform strategic decisions. Rosie * While some in the nonprofit field consider the term a dirty word, the fact is that we are all consumers. We all have needs, goals, and desires. Successful nonprofits are market-driven and understand that they need to have a customer-centric mindset to create value and remain relevant. I use the terms consumer, customer, member, donor, visitor, user, subscriber, and audience interchangeably. They all pay their money (or give their money, or spend their time, or exchange something else of value such as their attention, their data, or their voice) to an organization with the expectation that the museum will co-create value with them to help solve their problems and realize their goals. ** As quoted by renowned scholar and founder of modern marketing Theodore Levitt.
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Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S. Duncan, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016), 27. ↩
