Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure

[Source]https://hbr.org/2005/12/marketing-malpractice-the-cause-and-the-cure

The prevailing methods of segmentation that budding managers learn in business schools and then practice in the marketing departments of good companies are actually a key reason that new product innovation has become a gamble in which the odds of winning are horrifyingly low.

This is what I'm seeing at Leica, and at Tiffany. The managers learn to market in certain ways, but nobody seems to stop to ask if those methods are actually good or not.

There is a better way to think about market segmentation and new product innovation. The structure of a market, seen from the customers’ point of view, is very simple: **They just** need to get things done, as Ted Levitt said. When people find themselves needing to get a job done, they essentially hire products to do that job for them. The marketer’s task is therefore to understand what jobs periodically arise in customers’ lives for which they might hire products the company could make. If a marketer can understand the job, design a product and associated experiences in purchase and use to do that job, and deliver it in a way that reinforces its intended use, then when customers find themselves needing to get that job done, they will hire that product.

Making it easier and cheaper for customers to do things that they are not trying to do rarely leads to success.