Market Segmentation? Product vs Job-to-be-done

"Marketers should think less about market segments and more about the jobs customers want to do..."
This is what Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen affirms! Does it ring any bell to you? Do you have to go back to college and check all the marketing material again? No, you don't.
This idea of understanding the job-to-be-done by the customer rather than the customer himself comes from results of research conducted by Clayton.

"The idea that we should focus on understanding the customer and give the customer what she needs actually contributes to the failure of new innovations. The unit of analysis in coming up with great ideas are the jobs that are sitting out there needing to get done for which our products or services might get hired"

Listen to Clayton Christensen Milkshake example:

 "I wonder what job people hire a milkshake to do for them..."
"...it turns out that the competitor is not Burger King milkshakes but bananas, donuts, bagels, and snickers bars"

The new age of MOLO has come!

What are the different ways that companies are thinking about linking those two things: the ad or the offer, and the payment, and how does mobile change that?

 

Google has "a lot" of experiments in this area (Google has recently hired two senior managers from PayPal, who were working on mobile commerce services.). On May 27th PayPal filed a lawsuit against Google and two of its executives for stealing trade secrets! to be continued...

Google considers NFC (Near Field Communication) technology as an important opportunity for Android, and is making a big bet on it as a company. There is a lot of potential here.

What is Google belief on mobile commerce?
"we're going to see a real transformation in the mobile local space and how consumers interact with merchants, with service providers. We call it the age of MOLO - mobile local. And, we envision that consumers will be able to walk around and get offers nearby, and so we have several different offers products", said Google's VP of commerce Stephanie Tilenius at Techrunch Disrupt 2011.

She also announced a "mobile open and local" (MOLO) system for near-field communications (NFC) payments via smartphone, to be rolled out in New York and San Francisco for field testing.
Google is partnering with Citi Mastercard, Sprint and First Data to create a "Google Wallet" designed to integrate online payments and mobile shopping. The virtual wallet app will be available in the coming months through major retail partners which include Macy's, Walgreens, Subway, and Toys R Us.
The company stated that it is in negotiations via its partners with thousands of retailers around the globe to create an ecosystem for the Google Wallet.

There is a ton of activity around NFC in international markets, as an example, a successful trial of the technology that Starbucks ran in London. 

Not to mention that Mobile payments have been used for many years now in Japan.

Will it take off in europe and the US? I believe it will, it's just a matter of time to find the right model.