Marketing personas have long been a go-to tool for audience understanding. These fictional profiles typically include details like age, occupation, income, hobbies, and even preferred social media platforms. The goal is to humanize data, helping marketers build messages that resonate with specific audience types. While this can be helpful for content planning and campaign focus, traditional personas often fall short when it comes to guiding real-world strategy and decision-making.

What personas do well—and where they fall short

Personas are useful in that they offer a snapshot of the buyer. They answer questions like: Who is this customer? What do they look like? Where do they live? But in today's world, where consumers expect personalized, meaningful experiences, 'who' may not be enough. The true power in effective marketing lies in understanding why customers make decisions and what problem they’re trying to solve. This is where personas, especially demographic-based ones, can hit a wall.

For example, two consumers who are both 35-year-old urban professionals may have dramatically different motivations for choosing the same product. One might be driven by convenience, the other by sustainability. If your messaging doesn’t address these underlying differences, you risk sounding generic or missing the mark entirely.

Common limitations of persona marketing include:

• Lack of context: Personas tell you who the customer is, not what they need or what triggers their decisions.
• Overgeneralization: Grouping people based on demographics can obscure crucial behavioral or emotional drivers.
• Static nature: Most personas don’t evolve with changing customer behaviors or market dynamics.
• Messaging mismatch: Without clear insight into customer motivations, brand messaging can feel irrelevant or uninspired.

These challenges become even more obvious when attempting to fine-tune marketing efforts. As personalization becomes more important and customer journeys grow more complex, the traditional persona model can feel outdated. Brands risk talking to a stereotype rather than a real person with a specific need in a specific moment.

Why insights need depth, not just detail

Demographics and surface-level attributes have a place in customer segmentation, but they rarely capture the emotional and functional triggers that drive behavior. Understanding what job the customer is trying to get done—in other words, the progress they seek in their life or business—is often a more revealing and actionable insight. That’s where the JTBD framework begins to shine, offering marketers a new way to approach strategy that’s both grounded and goal-oriented.

To move beyond generic messaging, marketers need frameworks that reveal not just who their customers are, but what truly drives them. That’s where we turn next – to Jobs To Be Done and how it redefines consumer understanding from the inside out.

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a framework that helps marketers and product teams understand customer behavior through a different lens. The premise is simple but powerful: people don’t just buy products or services based on who they are – they 'hire' them to get something done. Whether it's commuting to work, entertaining guests, or making healthier choices, customers seek solutions to accomplish a specific “job.”

Customer needs told through action, not assumption

Unlike buyer personas, which often focus on background and identity, the JTBD framework zeroes in on context, intent, and desired outcomes. It digs into the why behind behavior. For example, instead of targeting “Sarah, a 34-year-old working mom,” JTBD asks: What job is Sarah hiring a meal delivery service to do? Is it to save time during a hectic week? Is it to feel like she’s providing balanced meals? These are the insights that clarify messaging and reveal unmet needs.

Core principles of JTBD include:

• Jobs are stable over time: While trends and preferences change, the fundamental jobs people need to do are more enduring.
• Jobs are rooted in context: The same person may have different jobs depending on the situation – weekday versus weekend, work mode versus vacation mode.
• Jobs include functional, emotional, and social dimensions: JTBD doesn’t just focus on utility – it also considers how people want to feel and be perceived.

Why JTBD is gaining traction in modern marketing

More marketers are leaning into job-based segmentation because it moves beyond demographics and brings focus to customer motivations. This can inform everything from messaging to product placement to innovation. Where traditional personas provide a static placeholder, the JTBD framework encourages you to listen to your customers’ language and align your strategy to their goals.

Here’s how using JTBD can improve key areas of your marketing strategy:

• Sharper messaging: Know exactly what customers want to accomplish and speak directly to those goals.
• Improved targeting: Segment by intention rather than traits – capturing multiple audiences who share the same job-to-be-done.
• More relevant experiences: Design content, campaigns, and journeys around clear customer progress markers.

JTBD doesn’t replace other customer insights tools. It complements them by adding depth, context, and behavioral clarity. And unlike static personas, it keeps pace with real-world changes in customer expectations and decision-making patterns.

For marketers aiming to better understand their target audience, pinpoint meaningful segmentation, and create messages that resonate, adopting a JTBD framework can deliver measurable benefits. Next, we’ll look at how JTBD and persona-based approaches compare in real marketing scenarios, so you can decide which might work best for your brand.

Customer segmentation is a core element of any successful marketing strategy. Both traditional marketing personas and the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework are used to understand target audiences, but they segment very differently—leading to distinct strategic outcomes.

Traditional Personas Focus on Who the Customer Is

Personas typically describe fictional representations of customers based on demographic and psychographic information. They answer questions like age, gender, job title, hobbies, and shopping preferences. A persona might be "Amanda, 34, Marketing Manager who enjoys yoga and shops online during her lunch hour." These add a relatable face to customer data, but often lack insights into actual purchase motivation.

This approach can create overly broad segments that blend different needs together. For instance, two 34-year-old women in marketing may have entirely different goals when buying the same product—but a traditional persona might group them together in the same audience bucket.

JTBD Focuses on What the Customer Is Trying to Achieve

In contrast, the JTBD framework segments customers by the job they are hiring a product or service to do. Rather than asking who they are, it asks why they buy. Whether they’re trying to save time, reduce stress, or make a better impression at work, the JTBD model homes in on that functional, emotional, or social objective.

This creates sharper, more actionable segmentation based on actual behaviors and goals—not assumptions about personality types. The power of job-based segmentation lies in shared intent across demographic diversity. A college student and a retiree may both “hire” an app to manage their finances because they're trying to feel more in control of their money.

Why This Difference Matters

When you're focused on personas, marketing teams might tailor campaigns based on surface-level traits. But these may not reflect what actually drives conversion. JTBD, on the other hand, unlocks deeper consumer insights that can directly inform product design, messaging, and sales tactics—leading to more effective targeting.

• Personas: Organize the target audience by demographics, habits, or lifestyle groups.
• Jobs To Be Done: Organize the target audience by their goals, pains, and progress they seek to make.

So, while both can play a role in customer segmentation, JTBD provides a more dynamic, use-case-driven lens on your audience—one that often translates better into marketing action.

In today’s cluttered media landscape, relevance wins. Consumers ignore messaging that doesn’t speak to their needs at the right time. This is where the Jobs To Be Done framework offers a clear advantage over traditional persona marketing.

JTBD Begins with Intention, Not Identity

Effective messaging is rooted in understanding why someone is seeking a solution in the first place. While buyer personas may suggest details like income level or favorite brands, JTBD surfaces the functional or emotional progress someone is trying to make. That core motivation helps you craft messages that connect deeply.

For example, instead of targeting "busy moms" (a common persona), a JTBD approach would focus on a specific job like: “Help me prepare healthy meals quickly during the week so I feel like I’m taking care of my family.” Marketing based on this insight would use messages like “Healthy dinners in under 20 minutes—feel confident even on your busiest days.” It speaks directly to the job at hand.

Real-Life Relevance Makes Messaging Stand Out

Job-based segmentation often leads to messaging that is:

• Focused: It zeroes in on the pain point or aspiration the customer is seeking to solve.
• Timely: JTBD insights reveal situations of use—making it easier to deliver messages when and where they matter most.
• Emotionally resonant: Customers are more likely to act when they feel understood.

Unlike persona-based campaigns that rely on profiling tendencies, messaging built on JTBD insights communicates value clearly. You’re no longer marketing a feature—you’re marketing a solution to a job your audience actively wants done.

Better Messaging, Better Results

The result? Stronger click-through rates, lower bounce rates, better conversions, and above all, a tighter alignment between your product and your customer’s needs at the moment of truth. If you’re looking to improve marketing results with JTBD, the key lies in matching your messages to motivations—not demographics.

Simply put: when consumers hear a brand articulate exactly what they’re trying to accomplish, they listen. JTBD helps you become that brand.

Both personas and the Jobs To Be Done framework offer value—when used in the right context. Knowing when to use each helps align your marketing strategy with the type of insight you truly need.

Use Personas for Broad Audience Understanding

If you’re starting out and need a general sense of your target audience’s lifestyle, demographics, or media habits, personas can help. They’re useful for branding, channel selection, and creative direction—especially for campaigns that require humanizing your audience to creative teams or stakeholders. For example, buyer personas are particularly helpful in consumer packaged goods (CPG) or retail when selecting tone, design, or spokespersons.

However, keep in mind that too much reliance on identity traits can become limiting. Demographic generalizations won’t always explain why someone makes a buying decision.

Use JTBD for Precision Targeting and Product-Market Fit

If your focus is on improving conversion rates, optimizing messaging, or designing products that meet unmet needs, JTBD is the better tool. It cuts through assumptions and reveals the underlying rationale people bring to a purchase. This makes it ideal for:

• Positioning products based on use-cases or need states
• Creating messaging rooted in real-life pain points and motivations
• Segmenting by intent rather than demographics

If you’re wondering how to use Jobs To Be Done in marketing, it works especially well for innovation scenarios, high-consideration purchases, or industries where customer motivations vary widely despite similar profiles—such as software, financial services, or healthcare.

The Best Approaches Blend Both

In reality, you don’t have to choose one or the other. Many successful marketing teams combine both frameworks:

Use personas to understand who is likely to encounter your brand, and JTBD to understand why they’ll engage with it. Together, they help you build messaging and strategies that are empathetic and effective.

At SIVO Insights, we often help brands bridge the gap—leveraging mixed methods to combine demographic context and behavioral motivation. It’s about using both tools in service of deeper consumer insights.