What We Do:
Inside Story provides robust research that describes the Jobs to Be Done (Clayton Christensen et al. 2016) that enables clients to see customers where none currently exist and visualise new uncontested market-places. We do this by providing a deep understanding of your customers and prospects as they struggle to make progress in their lives or strive to accomplish jobs that will positively transform their lives.
We deliver Jobs to Be Done insight with customers, prospects, and other stakeholders through our tried and tested research process.
We deliver a rich and multi-layered human story that springboards the design of exciting value propositions that help clients to reposition existing services and innovate new ones that disrupt existing markets. We define 4 key elements of the Job to Be Done:
Together these represent a rich and multi-layered human story that provides a robust springboard for value proposition design and product innovation.
Clayton Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma 2016) popularised the insight that people ‘hire products and services to get Jobs done’. Once defined, Jobs enable businesses to compete from the strength of human insight, which extends beyond the boundaries of existing product categories opening disruptive opportunities.
What It Involves:
“This was a project with significant potential business impact that required critical thinking to meet our specific needs…Sensitive interviewing and qualitative skill were demonstrated in identifying the Jobs to be Done with linked needs and benefits… We have worked with Inside Story across several research projects and found them to have an outstanding approach to complex, multi-layered projects. They are strongly collaborative, deliver practical insight and robust outcomes in a tight time frame.” Mark Solonsch
Customer Research Lead, Marketing & Brand Customer & Portfolio, Medibank.
What makes our approach different and better?:
Needs are central and help create powerful communications and value propositions.
“These needs are important to consumers, but their generality provides only the vaguest of direction to innovators as to how to satisfy them”… Clayton Christensen, Competing Against Luck, 2016.
Seeking reasons for the high failure rates of product innovation, Christensen has observed that knowing a target market’s demographics rarely provides a sufficient basis for innovation. Similarly, Customer Satisfaction and NPS® surveys can give some clues for identifying Jobs providing sometimes helpful background but are rarely sufficient by themselves. Asking people what can be improved provides limited insight.
There is the temptation to fall in love with your idea. The best possible outcome comes from a marriage of both internal knowledge and customer interviews conducted by independent and skilled qualitative researchers.
Data analytics can form a valuable resource for identifying aspects of the Job to Be Done specification, e.g., high value and high-frequency times of day, product combinations, and locations. However, customer databases can’t tell you why things are happening, and the why is critical to formulating new value propositions and developing new products and services.
Most of our clients are not short of ideas. They come to us to validate, refine and optimise their ideas and deepen their understanding of their customers and prospects.
We are experts at discovering situation-based human needs, struggles, and aspirations from scratch using advanced qualitative techniques such as metaphor elicitation.
What our clients say:
This was a project with significant potential business impact that required critical thinking to meet our specific needs…Sensitive interviewing and qualitative skill were demonstrated in identifying the Jobs to be Done with linked needs and benefits… We have worked with Inside Story across several research projects and found them to have an outstanding approach to complex, multi-layered projects. They are strongly collaborative, deliver practical insight and robust outcomes in a tight time frame.
Mark Solonsch
Customer Research Lead, Marketing & Brand Customer & Portfolio. Medibank.
…amongst the most innovative and insightful marketers. She (Inside Story’s CEO Liane Ringham) is always on the leading edge of breakthroughs in marketing science and effectively translates these ideas into practical applications that effectively guide business decisions… unique combination of deep consumer psychological insight and quantitative expertise result in very valuable interpretation of research data that provided a real competitive advantage to the business.
Gloria Farler
Former Executive Director, Market Based Management – Telstra
The research utlised depth interviewing. The outputs were communicated with clear action implications… The stakeholders who initiated the research have applied the principles learned in several new circumstances… I have no hesitation in recommending the services of Inside Story following this and previous experiences spanning two decades.
Gary Lembit
Senior Manager Client Services and Analytics – Perpetual.
This was a highly successful and innovative project (that we engaged Inside Story for). The project won an award for marketing innovation at our organisation. The recruitment was difficult and Inside Story have repeatedly shown their capability to deliver quality participants and impactful reporting.
Chris Taffs
Senior Insight Manager – News Limited
