Defending share? Once an idea begins to gain momentum, competitive response is inevitable. As described in Seeing What’s Next (written by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, and Erik A. Roth, Harvard Business School Press), nimble disruptive competitors typically take advantage of an incumbent’s structural weaknesses and blind spots. The jobs-aware incumbent, however, need not forfeit its prized market. One medical device company Innosight advised faced an attack from a competitor that tore a page out of the disruptive playbook to launch a “good-enough” solution at radically lower price points. Of course, our client could have matched the offering. It wondered if there might be a way to optimize its existing offerings so that customers wouldn’t consider the competitor’s offering good enough. To do so, it sought to understand the full range of jobs that practitioners needed to get done. The company learned that practitioners employing its device sought much more than clinical benefits. They also required training on how to effectively use the product, assistance in building market awareness of the device’s advantages over alternative treatments, tools that allowed them to communicate the device’s functionality to patients, and new mechanisms to help patients pay for the treatment. By pulling these and other innovation levers, the company was able to more sharply differentiate itself against its competitors.

1. Explain what you learned from reading the section (that adds new understanding to marketing);

2. Explain the role of the jobs-to-be-done framework and how it can be used for segmentation and targeting (in the "science of marketing");

3. Include examples from real companies (that you can get anywhere, except the article itself -- get from our textbook, the internet, practical experience, etc.) that illustrates the points in number 1