Get hired by the next Myopic Patient

Myopic patients hire eye care professionals to make progress in seeing the world better. In return, eye care professionals struggle to provide myopic patients with the right product and sometimes they involve themselves in a hit-or-miss innovative endeavor in the pursuit of satisfying the patient. If we try to understand why patients make choices, we can organize ourselves in a way that makes the patient hire our products and services. For example, if we try to figure out what job a myopic patient is trying to get done when he chooses a refractive surgery, we don’t need to advertise the procedure or look for celebrities’ endorsement to get the patient to do the surgery. For the patient, if the product we are offering does the job well, he will hire it again or refer his family and friends. If it does a crummy job, he will fire it and look for another alternative to solve the problem.

The theory of Jobs to Be Done was developed by Professor Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School. It offers a disruptive way to think about the value proposition related to what the patient is trying to accomplish or which pain the patient is trying to avoid when he hires a specific product or service to do the job. At a horizontal level, jobs are functional with emotional and social components. A successful marketer is the one who makes the job his unit of analysis and not the customer or the product. And a deep understanding of the job makes marketing more operative and innovation more foreseeable. It helps us understand why in certain circumstances a patient chooses to hire a refractive surgery to do the job while in other circumstances he prefers contact lenses, eyeglasses, or OrthoK. Data about a population related to the prevalence of high myopia patients or the tranches of the age of myopic people does not provide any clue about what product will they hire that will help them see better. According to Clay Christensen “Correlations does not reveal the one thing that matters most in innovation—the causality behind why I might purchase a particular solution. That answer, I believe, is found in the job I’m hiring a product or service to do.”