Competing Through the Jobs Lens¶
Definition¶
Viewed through jobs, a competitor is any offering — however different it looks, however differently it is made or sold — that satisfies the same customer job. This reframes competition away from an industry map (other brands of the same product) toward whatever else a customer could spend their time or money on to get the same job done, and it exposes many claims of serving an untapped, "nonconsuming" market as actually just narrow, self-imposed market definitions.
In the Book¶
Chapter 7 opens with Oreo's viral "You can still dunk in the dark" tweet during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout, tracing it back to an insight from Kraft's CMO: a customer waiting at the checkout line is really trying to pass time or relieve shopping stress, so Oreo's real competitor in that moment is the customer's phone, not other snack brands — echoing a 1964 Peter Drucker quote the book cites directly: "nobody pays for a 'product' ... the customer buys satisfaction ... all goods and services compete intensively with goods and services that look quite different." The chapter's central illustration is Nike sneakers: for the job of comfortable foot support, competitors are New Balance and Brooks, but for the emotional job of expressing individuality or projecting status, competitors become a bumper sticker, a haircut, or a watch — which is why Nike built NIKEiD ("Express your identity") to compete for that emotional spend directly. The chapter also warns against false nonconsumption claims: Digital Equipment Corporation kept defining its market as "workstations that cost $6,000–$10,000" well into the PC era and was eventually bought by a PC maker, while Décor Aid legitimately found real nonconsumption by bringing interior design to customers the industry had simply priced out, and micro-apartments in the U.S. turn out not to be a novel category at all once you notice the same job has long been satisfied in dense cities across China and Japan.
Why It Matters¶
Defining competitors by industry category makes companies blind to the substitutes that are actually winning the customer's time, attention, and spend, and it makes "we have no competitors" claims almost always false — either the market has been artificially narrowed, or the same job is already solved elsewhere and simply hasn't been recognized as a competitor. Seeing competition through the job also reveals where a company can expand the total market rather than merely defend share within an existing one.