The #JTBD of Hitting a Nail on the Head

I just read a post on HBR that hit the nail on the head when the author critiqued Whole Food’s treatment of the millennial age cohort as a…

I just read a post on HBR that hit the nail on the head when the author critiqued Whole Food’s treatment of the millennial age cohort as a market segment — requiring a separate chain of stores.

Whole Foods' Misguided Play for Millennials
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Since this was written by a jobs-to-be-done consultant, I thought for a moment that we may get some insight into how to properly define markets and market segments using jobs-to-be-done as a focal point. As she began to point out, some consider grocery stores to be a market and various demographics to be segments.

Jobs-to-be-done professionals know that markets are not defined by product categories because that would be solution-centric and prone to missing market opportunities. We also know that using convenient measures, such as age groups, is not the proper way to define segments because they don’t have a similar set of needs across…