Job Drivers

Definition

Job drivers are contextual facts about a customer — not jobs themselves — that determine which jobs rise to the top for that person. The book sorts them into three flavors: attitudes (social or personality-based, e.g., wanting to show off wealth), background (long-term factors like where someone lives), and circumstances (immediate, near-term situations like a season or event). Two customers can share the exact same jobs — safety, reliability, cargo space — and still buy completely different products because their drivers weight those jobs differently.

In the Book

Chapter 2 builds the concept through "Stan," who is shopping for a car and has standard jobs: avoid breakdowns, ride comfortably, stay safe. A Toyota Camry would satisfy those jobs perfectly — except Stan's attitude (an MBA from a prestigious school, surrounded by successful peers, driven to signal status) pushes him toward a Mercedes S-Class instead. Then his background (living atop a steep New England hill that gets snowy) rules out the Mercedes in favor of a Porsche Cayenne. Finally his circumstances (he just volunteered to coach his son's lacrosse team and needs to haul gear) rule out the Cayenne's limited cargo space, landing him on a Cadillac Escalade. The chapter opens with Best Buy's turnaround as the real-world proof: while Circuit City tried narrowing selection and cutting costs and ultimately closed, Best Buy built personas like "Buzz" (young tech enthusiast) and "Jill" (suburban soccer mom) that combined demographics with job drivers, then redesigned 110 stores around them — the redesigned stores saw same-store sales growth of over 9 percent, double the untouched stores.

Why It Matters

Job drivers explain variation that a jobs list alone cannot: why customers with identical objectives buy incompatible products, and why a single customer's priorities shift with the season, the occasion, or a change in their life. Segmenting on drivers rather than pure demographics (age, income) produces segments that predict behavior, because the driver is the reason a job's priority changed, not just a correlated label.