Stop Coordinating Chaos: A JTBD Approach to Truly Integrated Marketing

Applying Jobs-to-be-Done to align Business Units, Partners, and Customer Experience

We've all felt the pain. Marketing campaigns that clash between business units. Partner programs that generate noise but few quality leads. Endless meetings trying to sync messages, budgets, and schedules, only for the customer experience to remain fragmented and confusing. It feels like we're constantly coordinating chaos.

The hard truth is that most marketing integration efforts fail because they focus on the wrong thing: coordinating activities. We invest in complex CRM integrations, mandate shared calendars, and debate brand guidelines, but the underlying friction between business units (BUs) and partners persists. Why? Because we haven't clearly defined the real job the business needs integrated marketing to accomplish.

Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory offers a powerful lens to shift our perspective. Instead of asking "How do we integrate these marketing activities?", JTBD asks, "What fundamental progress is the business trying to make by having BUs and partners work together on marketing?". This shift is crucial for developing a strategy that's not just coordinated, but truly integrated and differentiated.

This post explores how to apply JTBD thinking to redefine your marketing integration challenge. We'll cover:

• Why typical integration fails.

• Defining the core Job-to-be-Done for your integrated marketing.

• Uncovering the desired outcomes and struggles.

• Using the concept of "elevating abstraction" to find differentiated solutions.

• The strategic implications for your business

Why Typical Integration Efforts Fall Short

Traditional integration often starts with processes and technology. We assume that if we can just get everyone onto the same platform or following the same workflow, integration will magically happen. But this ignores the fundamental drivers of behavior: objectives and desired outcomes.

When BUs have conflicting KPIs, or partners have different motivations, no amount of process streamlining will create true alignment. Forcing everyone to use the same CRM is useless if one BU's job is "Maximize transactional volume" while another's is "Cultivate long-term enterprise relationships". Their needs, struggles, and measures of success are different. Focusing solely on activity coordination papers over these cracks but doesn't fix the foundation. It leads to the common symptoms:

• Inconsistent messaging confusing customers.

• Duplicated efforts and wasted resources.

• Channel conflict between direct sales, BUs, and partners.

• Data silos preventing a unified view of the customer journey.

• Friction and frustration between teams.

Identifying the REAL Job-to-be-Done for Integrated Marketing

To break this cycle, we need to define the core job. What progress is the company as a whole trying to achieve? This requires stepping back from the activities and looking at the fundamental purpose.

Using strong, outcome-focused verbs, brainstorm potential core jobs. Consider these examples:

• Achieve seamless customer value perception across all touchpoints. (Focuses on the customer experience)

• Optimize resource allocation for maximum market impact. (Focuses on efficiency and effectiveness)

• Accelerate go-to-market timing through unified efforts. (Focuses on speed and agility)

• Generate predictable, high-quality demand across the entire ecosystem (BUs + Partners). (Focuses on growth and pipeline)

• Maximize customer lifetime value through cohesive engagement. (Focuses on long-term relationships)

The key is to define the job at the right level – broad enough to be strategic, specific enough to be actionable. Crucially, consider if the job should be framed from the customer's perspective (e.g., "Minimize effort required to find the right solution") or the business's perspective. Often, the most powerful jobs encompass both.

Uncovering Desired Outcomes & Struggles

Once you have a candidate for the core job, you can identify the metrics customers (internal or external) use to measure success – these are the desired outcomes. For the job "Achieve seamless customer value perception," desired outcomes might include:

• Minimize the time it takes for a customer to get a relevant answer, regardless of contact point.

• Minimize the likelihood of receiving conflicting information from different BUs or partners.

• Maximize the ease of transitioning between different stages of the buying journey (e.g., from marketing to sales).

• Maximize the feeling that the company understands their overall needs.

Next, identify the struggles or barriers preventing these outcomes today:

• Difficulty sharing customer history between BU systems.

• Lack of visibility into partner interactions.

• Inconsistent application of brand messaging guidelines.

• Slow internal processes for approving joint marketing materials.

• Partners lacking the right training or content.

Prioritizing which outcomes are most important and least satisfied, and which struggles are the biggest roadblocks, highlights where innovation is needed most.

Elevating the Level of Abstraction: The Path to Differentiation

Here’s where we move beyond fixing current problems to creating genuinely new solutions. Ask: Can we define a higher-level job that makes many of today's integration complexities irrelevant?

Think about the evolution from coordinating individual musician schedules and venue bookings (low-level activities) to the job of "experiencing live music" (core job), and finally to "accessing personalized audio entertainment on demand" (a higher-level job enabled by streaming services). Spotify doesn't coordinate radio stations and CD manufacturers; it fulfills a higher-level job that makes much of that coordination obsolete.

In our marketing integration example: Instead of the core job "Generate predictable, high-quality demand across the entire ecosystem," perhaps a higher-level job is:

• Ensure every qualified prospect automatically receives the optimal next engagement to accelerate their buying journey, regardless of origin or touchpoint.

This reframes the problem. The focus shifts from coordinating handoffs between BUs and partners to orchestrating an optimal journey. This higher-level view forces us to ask different questions:

• What data is needed to define the "optimal next engagement"?

• What automation or intelligence can deliver it?

• How do BU and partner activities contribute to this orchestrated journey, rather than being the journey?

Thinking at this higher level of abstraction reveals opportunities for novel solutions – perhaps an AI-driven personalization engine, a unified customer data platform built around journey orchestration, or new partner engagement models focused on contributing specific journey steps rather than owning leads. These solutions often inherently reduce the need for the painful, manual coordination that plagues lower-level integration efforts.

Building the Differentiated Strategy

Armed with insights from the core job, desired outcomes, struggles, and the elevated job, you can build a more robust and differentiated integration strategy:

1. Focus Innovation: Target solutions that directly address the most significant struggles preventing the achievement of critical desired outcomes for the core job or the elevated job.

2. Rethink Technology: Select and integrate technologies based on their ability to execute the defined job and deliver the desired outcomes, not just connect disparate systems. Does it help orchestrate the journey? Does it provide the needed intelligence?

3. Align Partnerships: Structure partner agreements, incentives, and enablement around their contribution to the core or elevated job. Are they helping achieve seamless value perception or ensure the optimal next engagement? Measure them accordingly.

4. Adapt Internal Structures & KPIs: Align BU goals, team responsibilities, and individual performance metrics with the desired outcomes of the integrated strategy. Shift focus from activity metrics (e.g., emails sent) to outcome metrics (e.g., journey progression speed, cross-BU conversion rates).

Conclusion: From Coordination to Orchestration

The relentless effort to coordinate marketing activities across complex organizations often yields diminishing returns. It’s time to change the frame. By applying Jobs-to-be-Done thinking:

• Define the real job your integrated marketing efforts need to accomplish.

• Identify the desired outcomes and struggles associated with that job.

• Explore elevating the level of abstraction to uncover higher-level jobs that enable differentiation and simplify execution.

• Build your strategy around achieving outcomes, not just coordinating activities.

This shift from coordination to orchestration, guided by a deep understanding of the Job-to-be-Done, is the key to unlocking a truly integrated, effective, and differentiated marketing strategy that drives meaningful business progress.

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What do you think?

• What's the biggest struggle you face integrating marketing across BUs or partners?

• What do you think is the real 'job' of integrated marketing in your specific context?

Leave a comment below!

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I believe that an innovation consultant should eat their own dog food. Therefore, we must always strive to:

• Get more of the job done for our clients

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