Marketing personas have been a long-standing tool in branding, messaging, and product positioning. They typically include demographic and psychographic details like age, gender, lifestyle preferences, and even hobbies. When launching a campaign or brainstorming product features, these personas offer an easy reference point – but they’re not always enough. Especially in today’s fast-changing consumer landscape, personas can begin to lose their usefulness at key moments.

Personas Describe People, But Not Their Motivations

At their core, personas tell us who our customers might be. What they often miss is why those customers make decisions. That’s a critical gap, especially in product development where understanding the need behind a choice can influence design, features, and functionality.

For example, knowing your target is "parents aged 30–45" tells you little about why they chose one streaming service over another. Are they seeking educational content for their kids? Looking for downtime after work? Making cost-based decisions? Personas frequently lack this depth of insight.

When Assumptions Lead to Missed Opportunities

Another common pitfall with user personas in marketing is that they often rely on assumptions built around generalizations. These can lead teams to focus on features or messages that don’t connect with what consumers are actually trying to achieve. This is especially true when entering new markets or launching innovation efforts.

• Risk of oversimplification: Personas may reduce humans to predictable stereotypes.
• Static over time: Personas don't evolve as quickly as customer needs do.
• Lack of context: Without the situation or trigger behind a decision, it’s hard to act effectively.

As a result, businesses using only personas may overlook key factors like emotional drivers, situational context, or competing priorities – all vital parts of customer insights that influence consumer behavior.

Where Product Development Needs More than a Persona

When it comes to innovation and design thinking, understanding customer needs means digging below the surface. Personas tell us who is buying, but not what they are hiring the product or service to do. This can create blind spots in product planning and lead to launches that don’t resonate.

This disconnect often shows up when a product underperforms despite being targeted at the "right" persona. In these instances, teams start asking: How can we get closer to why people choose us? That’s when it's time to explore market research tools like Jobs To Be Done.

In short, personas can be helpful at early stages or for broad targeting, but they often fall short in guiding strategy, product development, and understanding true behavior. For deeper human understanding, businesses need tools that reveal authentic motivations and shifting contexts. Enter JTBD.

Jobs To Be Done (often abbreviated as JTBD) is a customer-centered framework that focuses not on who the customer is, but rather on what they are trying to accomplish. Instead of creating fictional profiles, JTBD uncovers the goals or 'jobs' real people are trying to complete when they seek a product, service, or solution.

Understanding the “Job” in Jobs To Be Done

At the heart of the JTBD framework is a simple but powerful idea: when people buy a product, they are essentially "hiring" it to do a specific job in their lives. Whether that job is to save time, feel more confident, entertain a child, or reduce stress, understanding the underlying motivation helps companies design better solutions.

For instance, a parent isn’t just buying a blender. They might be hiring it to quickly prepare healthy breakfasts during their hectic morning routine. That motivation – not just the demographic – guides product selection, usage, and satisfaction levels.

How JTBD Differs from Traditional Personas

JTBD shifts the focus from defining the target audience to understanding their desired outcomes. Here’s how the two approaches compare:

• Personas: Based on assumed traits like age, income, lifestyle, and interests.
• JTBD: Focused on the context, motivation, and progress a customer seeks during decision-making.

This functional approach to consumer behavior provides richer market research insights by revealing what drives customer choices. It also prevents teams from building products around arbitrary labels and instead enables them to design around specific, real-world needs.

How to Use the JTBD Framework

Using JTBD in product development or marketing strategy often involves asking specific, behavior-driven questions during customer interviews or research sessions, such as:

• What triggered you to start looking for a solution?
• What outcome were you hoping to achieve?
• What other options did you consider?
• What ultimately made you choose this product?

These insights can be mapped into a Jobs framework that identifies functional, emotional, and social jobs. For example, customers might say they bought a fitness app to improve health (functional), feel better about themselves (emotional), and share progress with friends (social).

Why It Matters to Business Leaders and Decision Makers

Unlike persona-based strategies, JTBD connects offerings directly to customer needs. This is critical for:

– Enhancing product design based on real use cases
– Creating marketing messages that speak to true customer motivations
– Uncovering unmet needs that can drive innovation
– Reducing risk in product launches by focusing on jobs already being underserved

Whether you're a startup or an established brand, using JTBD for product development can help your teams stay aligned around the human problems you're solving. And in market research, it offers a clear lens for understanding customer jobs and motivations with depth and clarity.

In the next section, we’ll explore how to tell when it’s time to move beyond personas and start applying the JTBD framework to unlock actionable insights.

Marketing personas and the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework both aim to describe your customers – but they do it in fundamentally different ways. Understanding these differences is key to making better decisions in product development, messaging, and broader market strategy.

Personas are fictional profiles built from demographics, behaviors, or preferences. They often include names, ages, job titles, goals, and even hobbies. While this can help teams visualize their audience, personas tend to oversimplify or generalize customer behavior. It's easy to assume that all 35-year-old parents with tech jobs think the same way – but real people are far more complex.

The JTBD framework shifts the focus from who your customers are to what they’re trying to accomplish. Instead of asking, “What does Susan, the 35-year-old marketing manager, care about?” JTBD asks, “What job is Susan hiring this product to do in her life?” This question uncovers her deeper motivations, constraints, and priorities – which are often shared across different demographic groups.

Here’s a quick comparison of Personas vs. JTBD:

• Focus: Personas focus on identity and characteristics. JTBD focuses on customer goals and progress.
• Data type: Personas rely on surface-level traits. JTBD relies on qualitative insights from real-life problems and choices.
• Output: Personas create audience segments. JTBD defines functional, emotional, and social “jobs” your product is hired to solve.
• Application: Personas are often used in campaign targeting. JTBD drives product innovation and problem-solving strategy.

Because JTBD explores customer behavior through the lens of purpose and progress, it reveals why people make the choices they do – not just who they appear to be. This makes it especially powerful when customer needs are changing, when new markets emerge, or when your marketing persona fails to explain customer decisions.

Unlike traditional user personas, which can grow stale or become assumptions over time, Jobs To Be Done is grounded in direct observation and real-world use cases. It helps teams move past demographic guesswork into the realm of customer motivation insights and problem-solving, unlocking more meaningful innovation.

When you understand the job your customer is trying to get done, everything becomes more focused – from what you build to how you talk about it. That’s why the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework is a powerful tool for better product development and sharper marketing messaging.

Let’s say you’re developing a fitness app. A persona might tell you about “Rachel, a 28-year-old urban professional who enjoys running.” But JTBD digs deeper: Rachel uses your app not just to track workouts, but to feel more in control of her routine and stay motivated after work. That’s the job she’s hiring the app to do. Understanding that motivation leads to design features (like evening reminders) and messaging (like “Stay on track, even after long workdays”) that speak directly to her needs.

Ways JTBD improves product and message alignment:

• Reveals functional, emotional, and social drivers: JTBD captures the full picture of why customers make choices – not just what they do, but how they want to feel and how they want to be perceived.
• Bridges product teams and marketing teams: A shared JTBD perspective keeps everyone centered on solving real user problems, rather than guessing based on age or income bracket.
• Uncovers unmet or underserved needs: JTBD helps identify gaps your product can fill – whether it’s simplifying a process, saving time, or reducing anxiety.
• Guides prioritization decisions: Instead of building features for every persona, you focus on what matters most to your core user’s job-to-be-done.

Using the JTBD framework in product development brings much needed clarity. It avoids the trap of satisfying fictional attributes and instead sharpens development around outcomes your customer truly seeks. It also enhances color and clarity in your marketing – allowing you to articulate value in plain, customer-led language.

From taglines to UX design, the impact of JTBD becomes clear: products feel more intuitive and messaging resonates at a deeper level. Customers feel seen – not because you used their name in a persona – but because you understood what they’re really trying to achieve.

Knowing when to use Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) can help you make smarter choices about how you explore customer insights and build better solutions. While JTBD can be used broadly, it's particularly effective in situations where surface-level information – like demographics or persona profiles – doesn’t lead to clear decisions or innovation.

One of the biggest signs that your current personas aren’t working is when your team struggles to understand what’s driving customer behavior. You may have nailed the “who” of your target audience, but still can’t figure out why they don’t engage, convert, or come back. JTBD helps reframe these questions around purpose and progress – giving you consumer behavior insights that are grounded in real motivation.

Use JTBD when:

• You’re developing or refining a product or service: JTBD helps you focus on features or experiences that solve real customer problems, not just ideas that sound good on paper.
• Your personas feel disconnected or outdated: If you find yourself continually tweaking fictional personas but still missing the mark, it may be time for a framework that dives deeper.
• Target markets overlap or blur: JTBD cuts across traditional segments. Whether your audience spans age groups or industries, a JTBD lens helps you see common threads – like shared frustrations or goals.
• You want to clarify messaging and positioning: JTBD delivers sharp insights into the outcomes customers are seeking. This makes it easier to write copy, ads, and value propositions that hit home.
• You’re entering a new market: JTBD can reveal unique, job-specific opportunities that go beyond assumed customer needs.

In market research, JTBD is not a replacement for all other methods – rather, it’s a complementary approach that makes customer insights more actionable. It works best when integrated into qualitative interviews, concept testing, or early innovation sprints. Research teams like SIVO often use JTBD as part of a broader toolkit when building intuition around what drives decisions.

If you’re exploring alternatives to marketing personas – or just seeking a more practical way to drive innovation – JTBD gives you a direct path to understanding customer needs at their most essential. It strips away assumptions and surfaces real answers to questions like, “Why are they switching to this solution – and what are they trying to accomplish?”