Keeping It Simple
The fastest, simplest ways to grow your business - no jargon, no fluff. Practical strategies that actually work for SME owners in the USA, New Zealand, and worldwide.
A customer is not buying your product. They are hiring it to do a job in their life, and if you do not know what that job actually is, you are marketing to a customer who does not exist.
This single reframe, used by some of the most studied product teams in the world, explains why a cheaper, objectively worse competitor sometimes outsells a better product, and it is usually the fastest fix available to an SME whose marketing feels like it is talking past its customers rather than to them.
The Feature List Nobody Reads
The enemy here is marketing written from the product outward instead of the job inward. SME marketing obsesses over describing the product itself, the ingredients, the specs, the features, rather than the job the customer is actually trying to get done, which is rarely about the product category at all. People do not want a drill, they want a hole in a wall, and more precisely, they want the shelf that hole lets them put up. Marketing written from the product out reads accurate and persuades nobody.
Jobs To Be Done, in Plain English
Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, working with consultant Tony Ulwick, built the Jobs To Be Done framework around a famous piece of fast-food research. A chain wanted to sell more milkshakes and tested the usual demographic and taste-preference fixes with little result, until researchers watched who was actually buying them and when. A large share turned out to be commuters buying a milkshake alone in the morning, not as a dessert at all, but to make a boring drive less boring and stay full until lunch. That milkshake was competing less with other desserts and more with bananas, bagels and boredom itself. Once the chain understood the real job, a thicker shake that lasted the whole commute, sold through a faster lane, outperformed every flavour tweak they had tried.
- 1. Interview Around the Job, Not the Product — ask customers what was happening in their life right before they bought, not what they think of your features.
- 2. Name the Job in One Sentence — write it the way the customer would say it, not the way your industry would.
- 3. Find the Real Competitor — your competitor may not be in your category at all. A gym competes with Netflix and sleep, not only with other gyms.
- 4. Rewrite One Piece of Marketing Around the Job — take your best-performing ad or page and rewrite the headline around the job, then test it against the original.
"Kevin, you distilled business, marketing and sales strategy into powerful simple concepts and actions with real life stories of your start-up business and corporate life. You walk the talk with empathy and passion. Feedback has been off the charts. The energy in the room was palpable."
— Nikki, MahiTahi / Colab (11 Food and Beverage Companies)
Why Owners Keep Marketing the Product Instead of the Job
Owners know their product intimately, down to the ingredients and the specs, and it is natural to lead with what you know best. The job is invisible to you precisely because you are inside your own business, not standing in the customer's life at the moment they reached for a solution. This is where an outside strategist earns their keep, trained across 60 plus global brands to ask what job a brand is actually hired for, and able to spot the real job in a single customer conversation an owner has had a hundred times without hearing it.
Quick Wins This Week
- Call three recent customers and ask what was happening right before they bought, not what they think of the product.
- Write the job they were actually hiring you for in one plain sentence, no industry jargon.
- Rewrite your homepage headline or top ad around that job and run it alongside your current one.
Key Takeaways
- Customers hire products to do a job in their life, they are rarely buying the category itself.
- The job is usually invisible to the business, because owners know the product, not the moment the customer reached for it.
- Your real competitor may be outside your category entirely.
- Marketing written around the job outperforms marketing written around the feature list.
If you have never asked a customer what job they hired you for, that conversation is worth more than your next marketing dollar.
Kevin D’Ambros-Smith
Kevin is the founder of Simple-Growth and a business growth coach with experience at DDB, Ogilvy, and Saatchi & Saatchi. He has co-founded 9 companies, coached 200+ business owners one-on-one, and holds a 9.5/10 NPS. Every article on this blog reflects real-world experience - no theory, no fluff.
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