Warum Kunden kaufen: Strategie mit Jobs to be Done

Why do customers really buy? And why do they sometimes choose not to buy, even though your offer seems reasonable?

For startups and SMEs, this question is crucial. After all, growth often doesn’t fail because of a bad idea. More often than not, it’s simply unclear what problem customers are actually trying to solve. What alternatives do they see? What’s holding them back? And what message is actually reaching them?

Jobs to be Done (JTBD) addresses exactly this. The method helps you better understand purchasing decisions—not just through target audiences, personas, or general feedback, but through specific situations. You’ll discover what drives customers, what they want to avoid, and what progress they’re seeking. This leads to better decisions regarding innovation, strategy, offerings, and marketing.

In this workshop, you’ll learn a simple approach to JTBD. You’ll gain a pragmatic methodology tailored to startups, small teams, and SMEs. It’s also suitable if your startup hasn’t been founded yet and you want to develop your offering from the customer’s perspective right from the start.

To start, we’ll clarify what JTBD means. You’ll learn why customers don’t simply buy products or services—they use them to make progress in a specific situation.

Next, we’ll look at how JTBD differs from traditional market research. You’ll learn why qualitative interviews often yield different insights than surveys, target audience profiles, or pure data analysis.

You’ll then learn about three types of jobs. They’ll help you understand customer motivations more precisely. Building on that, we’ll show you how to prepare for and conduct JTBD interviews: Which questions will help you get to the heart of the matter? How do you avoid superficial answers? And how can you get closer to real decision-making situations?

In the next step, you’ll document your findings and distill them into clear job statements. We’ll also show you how to identify initial patterns: Where do opportunities arise? What alternatives compete with your offering? And where can you start?

Finally, you’ll turn these insights into decisions. You’ll learn how to derive initial ideas for strategy, positioning, your offering, and marketing.

After the workshop, you can start with your own case: whether it involves weak demand, unclear positioning, declining bookings, a new offering, a business idea, or an investment you’re unsure about.