If your signups have stalled or your repositioning isn’t landing, I’d bet good money the problem isn’t your funnel. It’s that you’re talking about features and benefits while your customers are still trying to figure out what they’re even struggling with.
That’s the gap Jobs to Be Done was built to close.
People can’t tell you what they want but they’ll tell you what isn’t working
Most people can’t tell you what’s next. They can only tell you what they know. They’ll talk about the problem they have. In some cases they’ll tell you why something would work, or they might even hand you a solution. But more often than not, they’ll tell you what they don’t want way more than what they do want.
So if you’re in marketing or growth, and you’re out there spouting features and benefits – most people don’t even know the features and benefits they’re looking for. We start listing them off and it doesn’t resonate. It doesn’t land. And the reason it doesn’t land is because we’re using our language, not theirs.
There’s this notion of resonance. When you use the language of customers – the actual words that are in their head – that’s what makes them go, “you know me.” Part of being great at marketing is being very focused on the language they use, not the language you want to use.
Learn more about unpacking Jobs to be Done with the Re-Wired Group podcast.
Your real job in marketing is creating space in the brain
When I think about what Jobs to Be Done does for marketing, the first thing it does is help you understand where the first thought happens.
How do we create the space in the brain?
How do people talk about their problem, and how do they talk about the outcomes they want?
This is where most repositioning falls apart. You’re repositioning around what you think the product does.
But the consumer doesn’t care what the product does – they care about the progress they’re trying to make. A Job is about the progress somebody’s trying to make in a very specific circumstance, and understanding the outcomes they’re seeking and the tradeoffs they’re willing to make.
Marketing’s role here is to help people become aware of the context they’re in. Help them hear the fact that they need something because half the time they didn’t even know they were struggling with it.
That recognition, that angst, is what causes them to act.
Stop engineering to a person who doesn’t exist
A lot of marketing teams build campaigns around personas. And look – if you’re doing nothing around the consumer, personas are better than nothing. But personas don’t consider variation, and they’re all correlative.
When you try to find that persona in the real world, they don’t exist. You end up engineering your message to something that doesn’t exist.
People are dynamic. They make decisions because of contexts in their lives all the time. Just because someone eats healthy, works out, and calls themselves a vegan – there are moments in time where they’re going to have some ice cream. Context drives decisions more than identity does.
So if your signup flow assumes people behave one way all the time, you’re going to miss them. You have to understand what’s going on around them that makes them make the decision.
Not just who they are – but when and why they say, “today’s the day.”
What this looks like in practice
When we do this work, what we find is that it’s not one thing that makes somebody act – it’s a cluster. Shared contexts, shared outcomes that group together. When you take that pure demand and bring it over to your marketing, it gets clearer. You see more opportunities because you’re not trying to guess. You’re matching language to real struggling moments.
And that’s the unlock for growth. People don’t want more choice. They want good choice. Your job in marketing is to be the good choice by making people feel seen, understood, and confident that you get what they’re going through.
When you do that, signups take care of themselves.