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OUR APPROACH

Often a client will come to us frustrated by what they see as a lack of fresh ideas coming through the organization.  They are concerned they have lost touch with what the customers truly want and are seeking to answer these questions:
  • How can we better understand customers? How do we discover real insights?
  • We want to get into a new market space, but where do we begin?
  • How can we find uncharted, "white space" opportunities with tremendous growth potential?
  • How do we beat our competitors?

How we respond

Many companies unintentionally limit themselves by focusing on improving the attributes of their product, or seeking to understand different demographic segments. Our view is that customers don’t buy products — they hire them to get important jobs done. Understanding the jobs that customers care about, but can’t adequately get done with existing products, can point to new paths for growth.

Our jobs-based research enables companies to find key frustration points, where customers are struggling to solve the problems they encounter in their lives. Companies can then understand what new solutions might drive growth by removing barriers — such as a lack of skills, wealth, access or time — that leave customers frustrated because they can’t get important jobs done in a satisfactory way.

We do this by following a proven process for identifying non-consuming markets and jobs to be done:


Build the jobs landscape

In this phase, we conduct several activities to gather and analyze data including:

  • Internal rainstorming sessions
  • Customer case studies
  • Focus groups
  • Customer observation / diaries / ethnography
  • Review of existing market research
  • Team analysis

We find that these techniques, driven by questions and observations that uncover the functional, emotional, and social drivers of customer behavior, provide the best basis for identifying areas that can fuel blockbuster growth. The goal at this stage is not to build statistically significant data, but to build a qualitative landscape of why certain customer types act as they do and to chart the full dimensions of the potential market.


Assess alternative solutions

After building the jobs landscape, we begin to assess different solutions that customers can hire to get the job done. We conduct this assessment by reviewing secondary sources, conducting external expert interviews, executing primary research, and using our experience to map out industry trends. During this phase, we seek to answer several questions:

  • What are the alternative solutions customers hire to get identified jobs done? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
  • How could the natural improvement trajectory of those solutions increase their ability to get targeted jobs done?
  • What emerging “fringe” solutions could blossom in the coming years?
  • What might customers be willing to give up in order to get something they really want?

We will also seek to understand approaches being taken by other companies and competitors outside of core markets that could ultimately be threats or opportunities. Through these efforts, we begin to identify potential “game-changing” solutions that could emerge in the next 3 to 5 years. 

Synthesize: Build the industry transformation map

Next, we use our proprietary frameworks and pattern recognition skills to synthesize the jobs landscape and the solution assessment into an industry transformation map.

This map lays out the critical jobs-to-be-done in the market, job inhibitors, what solution “owns” which job, which fringe competitors today might be powerful competitors tomorrow, and who is best positioned to grow and prosper in the coming 3 to 5 years.

We then use the industry transformation map to answer two questions:
 

  • Where is the fear? What developments would, if unchecked, negatively impact your competitive position in the marketplace?
  • Where is the hope? What white space opportunities exist — relatively important jobs that aren’t being addressed adequately by today’s solutions — where you could create an attractive new growth business?

Linking Jobs to Features

Finally, we focus on quantitative validation and prioritization of the jobs-to-be-done, including assessment of the prevalence of jobs-based segments in the target population. We link these segments to product or service attributes and innovation levers.

Where valuable, conjoint or choice analysis is applied to elicit the specific willingness of the customer to make tradeoffs between component jobs and offer variants. The results of the quantitative work highlight distinct, targetable jobs-driven customer segments seeking specific offerings.

A jobs-to-be-done research project typically lasts 3 to 6 months, depending on the scope of customer types, geographies, and potential solutions.