Mission: Turn the ad paradigm on its head

Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen is trying to shake up the marketing establishment with a deceptively simple proposition that flies in the face of conventional wisdom:

People hire a product to get a job done.

Sometimes the job is functional: I need to send this document from here to there as fast as possible. Other times it is emotional: Help me escape the chaos in my world. And often it's aspirational: I need to feel pampered. Different products -- Federal Express, Apple's iPod, and Gucci's handbags -- are retained for these different tasks.

Marketers, however, ply their trade in a whirl of product extensions and customer segmentation increasingly divorced from the realities of needs and jobs. They focus on bells and whistles, features and options, baby boomers, soccer moms, and upwardly mobile young professionals with disposable income.

Employing customers or products as the fundamental unit of analysis -- rather than jobs -- amounts to ''marketing malpractice," Christensen and a pair of coauthors contend in a provocative essay in last month's Harvard Business Review.

''Some of the fundamental paradigms of marketing -- the methods that most of us learned to segment markets, build brands, and understand customers -- are broken," writes Christensen along with Intuit Inc cofounder Scott Cook and Taddy Hall, chief strategy officer of the Advertising Research Foundation.

''To build brands that mean something to customers, you need to attach them to products that mean something to customers. And to do that, you need to segment markets in ways that reflect how customers actually live their lives."

Christensen's marketing ideal is the ''purpose brand," a product tightly linked with the job it is hired to perform. Many of today's successful brands, from Starbucks and Kleenex to eBay and Google, started as purpose brands. But companies can squander their brand equity if they slap their successful brands on all-purpose products that don't address real needs.

And they can leave themselves vulnerable by failing to understand how new technologies can handle jobs for which their products were hired.

Sony's tape-playing Walkman was the breakthrough product helping people tune out the world, but Sony failed to capitalize on it by rolling out a Walkman-branded MP3 player.

The foray into marketing theory is something of a departure for Christensen, a 6-foot, 8-inch intellectual powerhouse who looms large in the field of business innovation and has built his own brand at Harvard Business School around the concept of disruptive technologies that transform markets and industries.

His model, laid out in his 1997 book ''The Innovator's Dilemma," has become part of the vocabulary of business and a springboard for several other Christensen books.

Christensen sees purpose branding as key to the success of disruptive innovations. Kodak's single-use camera, the FunSaver, for instance, was a classic disruptive product that met with resistance within the company but was given the green light and launched by a separate organizational unit. It was marketed as a product consumers could hire to save memories of a fun time when they forgot to bring a camera or (think rock climbing) didn't want to risk harming their expensive one.

It's not easy to quarrel with Christensen's insights, but some veteran marketing executives question whether he and his co-authors are breaking new ground in their article.

Chris Colbert, managing partner at Pile and Co., a Boston consulting firm that works with advertisers and their agencies, says the most passionate debates within marketing circles these days revolve around allocating resources and measuring results, not around branding or differentiating products.

''Purpose branding is just another moniker for the need to satisfy customers," Colbert said. ''That thought has been around for decades. I think the inherent struggle is that marketers get too close to their products or services, and all of a sudden the features take on too much weight and they're layering on features. And at the end of the day, the customers don't want the features, they want the benefits."

Christensen, in an interview, said product managers should spend less time on market research and more time walking around and observing how people live their lives -- their habits, behavior, and cycles.

There are many jobs people encounter at different stages of their lives for which no products have been specifically designed, he suggested.

Christensen said he recently drew a blank when pondering what car he should buy his daughter Annie for a college graduation gift.

The car that could do the ''sweet Annie job" would be stylish and fun to drive for Annie, but would assure Christensen his daughter was safe and in reach.

Thus, he was looking for a car with a hands-free phone, prepaid servicing, and some version of General Motors' OnStar system that could notify the police -- and him -- in the event of an emergency.

And he wanted these as standard features, not options.

Alas, while Volvo handled the safety job and BMW the aspirational job, no car presented itself for the sweet Annie job.

''When I find myself needing to get that job done, there's a word that needs to pop into my mind that will guide me to the company and the dealership that has that package," Christensen said, ''and that would just help me feel like I'm taking care of sweet Annie."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.