The Social Job and the Importance of Perception

On Black Friday 2011, every major retailer was running the same play. Discounts. Limited-time offers. Doorbusters. The usual arms race of urgency.

Patagonia took out a full-page ad in the New York Times. It said: "Don't Buy This Jacket."

The ad detailed the environmental cost of producing their bestselling R2 fleece—135 liters of water, roughly 20 pounds of CO2 emissions, and two-thirds of the jacket's weight in waste material. It asked people to think before buying. To repair before replacing. To consider whether they actually needed it.

Sales went up 30% in the following months.

That result makes no sense if you think Patagonia sells jackets.

It makes complete sense if you understand what the social layer of the job actually is.

The social layer

When someone hires a product, they're doing three things simultaneously.

They're trying to accomplish a task (functional). They're trying to feel a certain way (emotional). And they're managing how they appear to the people around them.

That third one is the social layer.

It's the job of identity and perception. What does choosing this product say about me? What tribe does it signal membership in? How does it make me look to the people whose opinion matters to me?

The social layer is rarely spoken out loud. In user research, nobody says "I want this because it makes me look smart." But it shapes decisions constantly.

Patagonia customers aren't buying a jacket. They're buying membership in a particular identity: someone who cares about the planet, who chooses quality over quantity, who isn't fooled by fast fashion.

The "Don't Buy This Jacket" ad didn't undermine that identity. It reinforced it. Buying Patagonia after that ad wasn't consumerism. It was a statement.

When the social layer is the entire point

Apple launched "Shot on iPhone" in 2015 as a campaign for the iPhone 6s.

The functional job was clear: take good photos. The camera had improved and Apple wanted people to know it. But the campaign didn't show tech specs or compare megapixels.

It showed photos—real ones, taken by real iPhone users—on billboards in 85 cities across 26 countries. Ordinary people's images, blown up to the scale of architecture, displayed in Times Square and on the sides of buildings in São Paulo and Tokyo.

The message underneath the photos wasn't "the iPhone takes great pictures." It was: "You are a photographer."

That's a social job. Not "capture memories" (functional). Not "feel creative" (emotional). But the external identity of being someone who makes art, not just snapshots. Someone whose eye is worth displaying at scale.

The campaign generated over 29 million Instagram posts tagged #ShotoniPhone. Apple didn't create that—they unlocked it, because they gave iPhone users a social identity worth performing.

By 2024, the campaign had generated billions in earned media value.

The product that got the social job catastrophically wrong

Google Glass launched its Explorer Program in 2013.

The technology was genuinely impressive. Hands-free information display. Navigation overlaid on your field of vision. The ability to take photos and record video without reaching for a device.

The functional job was real: access information and capture moments without interrupting what you're doing.

The social job was a disaster.

Within months of the Explorer Program launch, the term "Glasshole" had entered common usage. Bars banned them. Restaurants asked people to remove them. People wearing Glass reported being confronted, mocked, and in some cases physically assaulted. Several cinemas and casinos banned the device outright.

The problem wasn't the technology. It was what wearing Glass said about you to everyone else in the room.

You were the person recording without consent. The person who'd paid $1,500 to look like a cyborg in public. The person who thought their need for constant information access was more important than other people's comfort.

Google had designed for a functional job and an emotional job ("feel connected, feel ahead of the curve") and had completely missed that the social job would work against them.

A product that makes you look bad to others—or makes others feel surveilled by you—has a social layer problem that features can't fix. Glass was discontinued in consumer markets in 2015.

The social layer in B2B

In B2B, the social layer isn't just about whether a tool works. It's about what choosing it says about you as a leader.

An engineering manager who moves their team from Jira to Linear is making a statement before anyone opens the new tool. They're signaling that they value speed over process, that they trust developers to manage their own work, that they're closer to the modern dev stack than the enterprise one. Whether they'd phrase it that way or not, the people around them read it that way.

The reverse is also true. Sticking with the incumbent — even when everyone agrees it's painful — can be its own social signal. "We're serious. We're enterprise. We don't chase shiny tools." There's a reason some CTOs resist switching off Jira even when their teams are begging for it. The tool carries organizational identity, not just workflows.

This is why technically superior products sometimes lose to well-known incumbents. The decision-maker's social job — what the choice says about their judgment, their values, their professional identity — can outweigh the functional and emotional case entirely.

When social conventions shift, some products get stranded

Tool preferences carry social signals. Those signals change. BlackBerry is the clearest example of a product stranded by a social layer shift.

Through the late 2000s, carrying a BlackBerry was a professional signal. It meant you were important. It meant you were connected and responsive. The physical keyboard and the PIN-to-PIN messaging created a kind of professional identity around the device.

Then the iPhone arrived and, more significantly, the social signal changed.

By 2011, carrying a BlackBerry was no longer a signal of importance. It was a signal of institutional inertia. Of the company that hadn't updated their device policy. The social layer had inverted.

BlackBerry's functional job hadn't changed. Email still arrived. Calls still worked. But the social job—what the device said about you to your peers—had shifted completely.

Consumer adoption collapsed. BlackBerry's smartphone market share went from roughly 20% in 2009 to under 1% by 2016.

The social layer is hardest to spot in your own product

Every product carries a social signal.

Using Notion signals something different than using Apple Notes. Using Linear signals something different than using Jira. Sending a Loom instead of writing an email says something about how you work.

Sometimes those signals are a deliberate part of the product's Pull. Often they're invisible to the teams building it. The way to find the social layer is to ask different questions:

• "What does using this product say about you to your colleagues?"
• "Would you feel comfortable if your manager saw you using this?"
• "If you recommended this to your team and it failed, what would that mean for you?"
• "What kind of person uses a product like this?"

That last question is worth sitting with.

If the answer is positive and specific—"someone who cares about craft," "someone who takes their work seriously," "someone who's ahead of the curve"—you have a social job to design for and communicate.

If the answer is negative or embarrassing, you have a problem that no feature will fix.

Patagonia understood what buying their jacket said about you before their customers did.

Google didn't understand what wearing Glass said about you until it was too late.

Both had a functional product. The social layer is what separated them.