Summary: This article on post market research looks at under-served jobs and over-served jobs.
If a job or outcome is important and unsatisfied for current solutions or detriments, it is an obvious area of opportunity.
For all jobs and outcomes, scores of over 15 are extreme areas of opportunity! 12 – 15 are pretty good and ripe for improvement! 10 – 12 are worth of consideration in a broad market because they may allow you to focus on a segment better. Scores below 10 are unattractive areas of opportunity.
In the case of high Opportunity Scores compared to ideal solutions, both from consumers and within the company, this shows that the actual product type may be ripe for replacement through innovation, or that there is a lot of value still to be realised with improvements being made to the current favoured product type for the job.
Common mistakes involve using opinion, intuition, and guesswork instead of using the hard data. This can lead to improvements in areas that satisfy unimportant jobs and outcomes, in areas that are already satisfied, or making improvements that negatively impact other outcomes. Now you have your data, you must listen to and use your data! Also, keep a close eye on the weighting scores. Consumers may rate everything 10 or 9s in terms of importance, but when they weight them, you might find that just one job or outcome has over 50 of the 100 allocated points, which tells you a very different story. A score of 50 obviously shows you that in reality it is as important as all the other jobs or outcomes out together!
Post Research – Overserved Jobs and Outcomes
Knowing where the market is over served is also very important, because we are interested in optimising value to the requirements of customers – not just adding as much value as we can. Customers are over served where they are very satisfied, but the job or outcome is not very important. It costs money to make people very satisfied, money that eventually gets added to the price they have to pay. Airlines are a classic example here of how more and more features add to the price! One of the reasons SouthWest Airlines, the leading budget airlines is able to bring parity with the value offered by the more expensive airlines is through its focus on one of the biggest Value Creators of all – great service. Once staff are in the air they have been paid for – great service is therefore free!
If you find these overserved areas you know that you can cut out Value Creators and thus costs, as improving on satisfying the job or outcome is a waste of money – consumers are satisfied enough and the area is just not that important to them. Plus, if the job or outcome is unimportant, its money that your company could better spend elsewhere on improving the things that do matter to customers but where they are dissatisfied. Indeed consumers will often trade cost for being less satisfied with jobs and outcomes that are not important to them.
You can see when a market is overserved because the satisfaction rating is higher then the importance rating.
If there are many overserved jobs and outcomes discovered in a market, then a company may consider taking out cost amongst multiple dimensions and creating a lower cost business model that existing competitors would be unable to match, again the budget airlines are a classic example.
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