NOVEMBER 2016 / NO. 1
TAGS: UNILEVER, CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN, CMI, PREDICTION, BIG-DATA, COMPANY RADAR ROOM

Unilever’s CMI and Clayton Christensen’s “jobs-to-be-done”

“The new source of competitive advantage is customer centricity: deeply understanding your customers’ needs and fulfilling them better than anyone else”, Unilever in Harvard Business Review 9/2016
“After decades of watching great companies fail, we have come to the conclusion that the focus on correlation and on knowing more and more about customers is taking firms in the wrong direction”, Clayton Christensen in HBR 9/2016
It was interesting to read first about Unilever’s Consumer and Market Insights Group (CMI), and then Christensen’s comments that most companies spend too much time and money compiling data-rich models that make them masters of description but failures at prediction. Let us explain. Organizations now know more about their customers than ever before. Big-data analytics can provide an enormous variety and volume of customer information at unprecedented speed. Almost all companies have established structured, disciplined innovation processes and have brought in highly-skilled talent to run them. Structure is created to show correlations. However, correlation is not the same as causality, and most managers have grown comfortable basing decisions on correlations.
Unilever’s CMI mission is “to inspire and provoke to enable transformational action”. CMI implemented a global marketing information system accessible to all marketers across the organization that integrates data and presents it in a consistent format. The ultimate aim is that all users, wherever they reside in the firm, see the same information in the same way, what CMI calls “one version of the truth”. CMI is a fully independent function with a direct line to the CEO.
Jobs-to-be-done was developed as a complement to Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation, which at its core was about competitive responses to innovation. However, the disruption theory does provide a solution of how to create products and services that customers want to buy. Jobs-to-be-done transforms the understanding of customer choice in a way that no amount of data ever could, because it gets at the causal drivers behind a purchase. Successful innovation helps consumers solve problems: it can be both much more predictable and profitable if you begin by identifying jobs that customers are struggling to get done.
Both Unilever’s CMI and Clayton Christensen’s Jobs-to-be-done are ideal solutions designed to meet future customer needs. Unilever’s CMI solution is almost similar to solutions that our firm created some years ago with our Corporate Radar Room, SWAT and SEALS Teams and MI7, which, however, went far beyond the limited scope of marketing at Unilever’s CMI Group.
“79% of insight functions at overperforming companies participated in strategic decision-making at all levels of the organization, compared with just 47% at underperforming companies”, Insights 2020
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