A few years ago I worked with a web3 company building blockchain authentication for high-end art. Tokenize a painting, prove it's real, prove the chain of custody, fix one of the oldest problems in the art market.
What they could not figure out was why their messaging was not landing.
They had a website that explained the technology. They had a deck that showed the partnerships. They had product demos. They had blockchain credentials. They had everything you would expect a serious crypto-native company to have.
The story still was not moving customers.
I came in and we did the most fundamental piece of customer research there is. The piece almost nobody actually does, no matter how much they say they care about their customers.
We asked what their customers were trying to get done.
YOUR CUSTOMERS DON'T BUY PRODUCTS
Your customers do not buy products. Your customers hire products to do specific jobs in their lives. This is Jobs To Be Done, a framework with roots going back to Tony Ulwick's work in the early 1990s and later popularized by Clay Christensen. It has been quietly resetting how the best companies in the world think about their customers for three decades.
The job is not the product. The job is what the customer is trying to make happen, in their actual life, when they show up to your door.
Somebody who buys a quarter-inch drill bit is not in the market for a drill bit. They are in the market for a quarter-inch hole. If they could get a quarter-inch hole without the drill bit, the drill bit company would have a serious problem. The job is the hole, not the drill.
This is so simple it feels like a trick. It is not a trick. It is the difference between companies who get bought and companies who get ignored.
WHAT WE LEARNED IN THE ROOM
When we sat down and actually talked to the people who were buying art tokenization, we found out something interesting.
Some of them were trying to do a functional job, which was the obvious one. Authenticate the painting. Prove provenance. Reduce fraud risk. That was the marketing the company was leading with, and that messaging worked fine for those buyers.
But that was not most of the buyers.
Most of the buyers were trying to do an emotional job. They wanted to feel like a serious player in a market that historically has been run by old gatekeepers who would never let them in the room. The technology gave them legitimacy. The token gave them a story to tell at dinner. The chain of custody gave them a kind of permanent receipt that said, you belong here now.
Some of them were trying to do a social job. They wanted to be seen by other collectors as someone on the front edge. Buying a tokenized work was a flag in the ground that said, I am paying attention to where this market is going and you should too. The art was almost beside the point. The signal was the point.
The product was being hired to do three completely different jobs by three different segments of buyers. The marketing was speaking to one of them and barely. The other two had to figure out for themselves whether the product would do what they actually needed.
Most of them did not figure it out. Most of them went somewhere else. Most of them, when they went somewhere else, did not buy a competing product. They bought something completely unrelated that did the same job better.
The company was not losing to other web3 companies. The company was losing to a luxury watch, a charity gala donation, an invitation to the right yacht in Saint-Tropez. Anything that did the emotional or social job better than the technology was doing it.
WHY THIS GOES WRONG IN ALMOST EVERY COMPANY
The reason most companies do not understand the job their customer is hiring them to do is because they fall in love with the product.
The product is what they built. The product is what they meet about. The product is what shows up in the slides. The product is what gets demoed. The product is what they argue with engineering about. After enough quarters of this, the company starts to believe the product is the thing being purchased.
The product is not the thing being purchased. The job is. The product is the tool. The job is the outcome the customer needs in their life.
When you confuse the two, your messaging starts speaking to people who already understand your product, which is mostly your team and your most loyal customers. Everyone else hears noise.
This is the constraint behind a hundred different surface symptoms. Sales cycles that are too long. Pitches that are too technical. Marketing that talks about features instead of outcomes. New customers who never come back. Customer interviews that produce nothing useful because you are asking them about the product instead of asking them about their life.
If your story is disconected from the actual jobs your customers are hiring you to do, no amount of strategy work, copywriting, or design polish is going to fix it. You can rebuild the website. You can hire a new agency. You can bring in a fractional CMO. None of it will hold.
The job has to come first. Then the messaging. Then everything else.
HOW TO DISCOVER THE ACTUAL JOB
The framework is simple. The execution is hard.
You ask customers, in detail, what they were doing the day they decided to buy. Not what they bought. What was happening in their life that day. What had they tried before. What had failed. What were they hoping would change after the purchase.
You do not ask them about your product. You ask them about their life. The product is incidental.
People will tell you. They will tell you in language you have never heard them use about your company before. The first three customer interviews will tell you more than the last two years of strategy meetings combined.
You will hear, almost every time, that the job they hired you to do is something different than the job your messaging is currently aimed at.
That gap is where your growth is.
WHAT TO DO WITH THIS
Pick five customers who said yes to you in the last six months. Real ones. Not the ones who were going to buy anyway. The ones who actually had a choice and chose you.
Get on the phone with them. Not a survey. A phone call. Twenty minutes each.
Ask them what was going on in their life the week they made the decision. Ask them what else they were considering. Ask them what they were really trying to make happen for themselves. Listen for the emotional and social job underneath the functional one. Take notes. Do not argue. Do not sell. Do not pitch.
Five calls. One hundred minutes total. Then sit with the notes and ask yourself, honestly, whether your current marketing is pointed at the job they actually hired you to do.
If it is, congratulations, you are in the ten percent. Keep going.
If it is not, you have just found the lever that is going to move your business for the next twenty four months. Pull it.
So much respect.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is Jobs To Be Done and why does it matter for marketing?
Jobs To Be Done is a framework rooted in Tony Ulwick's work from the early 1990s and later popularized by Clay Christensen. It says customers do not buy products, they hire them to do a specific job in their life. The job is the outcome they need. The product is just the tool. When your marketing speaks to the product instead of the job, most of your audience hears noise.
What are the three types of jobs customers hire products to do?
Functional jobs are the obvious ones. Authenticate the painting. Move the file. Close the deal. Emotional jobs are about how the customer wants to feel as a result of the purchase. Social jobs are about how the customer wants to be seen by others. Most companies speak to the functional job and ignore the other two. Most customers are primarily motivated by the other two.
How do you find out what job your customer is actually hiring you to do?
Get five customers on the phone who said yes to you in the last six months. Ask them what was happening in their life the week they made the decision. What had they tried before. What had failed. What they were hoping would change. Do not ask about your product. Ask about their life. Five calls, one hundred minutes, and you will know more than two years of strategy meetings told you.
Why do companies lose customers to completely unrelated competitors?
Because the competitor was doing the job better, even if the product was different. A web3 art authentication company is not competing with other web3 companies for the buyer who wants social legitimacy. They are competing with luxury watches, charity galas, and yacht invitations. Anything that does the social job better is the real competition.
What happens when your messaging is aimed at the wrong job?
Sales cycles get long. Pitches get technical. New customers do not come back. Customer interviews produce nothing useful because you are asking about the product instead of the life. The symptoms are everywhere. The root cause is one thing: your story is not connected to the job your customer actually hired you to do.
How long does it take to identify the real job your customers are hiring you for?
Five customer interviews. Twenty minutes each. One hundred minutes total. The first three will reorient everything. The last two will confirm it. Most companies have been sitting on this data for years without asking the right question.