Summary: This article is step 1 parts 3 and 4 of our free guide to market research.
Step 1 Part 3
Find the Opportunity Sores for jobs people are trying to do when they use value.
Now you have a list of jobs you want to know how important they are to doing the Ultimate Goal, so you need ask for weighting of each job in order of importance to completing the Ultimate Goal.
Ask
- What are the weighting points out of 100 for the importance of each job, splitting 100 points between them all?
- Rank the importance of each job from 1st to last
- What’s the importance of each job on a scale of 10 – 1, with 10 being most important?
- satisfied?Using your current solution, how satisfied with doing each job are you with each on scale of 10 – 1, with 10 being totally satisfied.
- Is this the best solution available? If not what is? If you were using the best solution, how satisfied with doing each job would you be on scale of 10 – 1, with 10 being totally satisfied?
- If you were using your ideal solution, how satisfied with doing each job would you be on scale of 10 – 1, with 10 being totally satisfied?
Step 1 – Part 4
Find the outcomes people are trying to achieve for each job they are doing or would like to do.
Getting your list of jobs complete is vital to good market research, because jobs lead to outcomes which we can then measure. When we know what jobs people want and what outcomes they seek, we know how to outperform along the Value Line, because we have a target to aim for.
It’s to collecting outcomes we now turn.
For each job you would ask.
To complete that job well, how would you do it? What things would you need to happen?
(This is where you collect outcomes – you know when you have found an outcome because it could have been around for hundreds of years and is dependent on the job being done – not the solution. So minimise number of passes across the skin is not an outcome because it assumes the solution is a razor. Minimises time taken to remove hair is an outcome and has been around thousands of years before shavers were invented!)
- To what level must each of these outcomes be maximised or minimised?
- How would you measure success?
- Can you compare success to other solutions in any area?
(Customers often use other solutions as a frame of reference – remember all good quality and performance is relative!)
The data you need must give you specific metrics consumers to define the successful execution of the Ultimate Goal and each job.
Just how comfy does that seat have to be and what makes it comfy? Just how quick does the service need to be? What is “quick”?
Your questions must lead to you getting data that is actionable. This thereby improves your chances of giving the consumer something that delights them!
Typically desired outcomes can be split into 3 steps –
Actual outcome desired (amount of vibration or cutting accuracy for example.)
Direction of improvement (minimise or increase)
Unit of measure – metric (number, time, frequency, likelihood and often competitors solution)
So for a plagiarism scanner a desired outcome for the job of “Detect Internet plagiarism” the outcome maybe – “Increase likelihood of finding plagiarised sources to 99%” and a measurement of success would be – “Always find more plagiarism than Turnitin”.
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