THE ROLE

JOSEPH is looking for a Research Analyst to strengthen the intelligence behind our strategic work.

Every strong recommendation begins with understanding.

Understanding the market. The customer. The competition. The category. The economics. The behavior. The history. The signals of what may be changing next.

Your job is to help us understand those things better than we did before.

You will work alongside Associates, Strategists, and Principals to investigate the questions at the center of client engagements and build the evidence from which strategic decisions are made.

This is not research for the sake of research.

Your work should change what we understand.

And what we understand should change what we decide.

THE WORK

A client may come to JOSEPH believing they have a positioning problem.

Research may reveal they have a customer problem.

They may believe a competitor is winning because of price.

The evidence may show something entirely different.

They may believe an opportunity exists in a market.

Your work may tell us why it doesn't—or reveal a better opportunity somewhere nobody was looking.

That is why research matters here.

We aren't looking for information that confirms what we already believe.

We are looking for evidence that gets us closer to the truth.

Your responsibility is to find it, interrogate it, connect it, and help the team understand what it means.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Conduct rigorous research across companies, customers, competitors, categories, markets, and industries.
• Investigate unfamiliar sectors quickly and develop a working understanding of how they operate.
• Gather and evaluate information from primary and secondary sources.
• Analyze market data, company information, customer behavior, industry research, and competitive activity.
• Build competitive landscapes and category perspectives.
• Support customer and audience research.
• Identify patterns, contradictions, emerging signals, and gaps in conventional understanding.
• Evaluate the credibility and limitations of sources.
• Distinguish fact from assumption and evidence from opinion.
• Test strategic hypotheses against available evidence.
• Synthesize large amounts of information into clear findings.
• Turn findings into implications for the strategic question.
• Work with strategists to determine what we still need to know.
• Contribute research and perspectives to JOSEPH's broader body of thinking.

THE STANDARD

Curiosity is the starting point.

Rigor is what makes it useful.

You don't stop because you've found an answer.

You want to know whether it's the right answer.

You check the source.

You question the methodology.

You notice when two pieces of information don't agree.

You recognize when everyone is citing the same underlying claim.

You know the difference between correlation and explanation.

And you understand that the most visible information is not necessarily the most important information.

You are willing to keep digging.

Not endlessly.

Purposefully.

Because sometimes the thing everyone else missed is the thing that changes the decision.

HOW YOU THINK

You have an investigative mind.

You enjoy entering a subject you know almost nothing about and gradually understanding how the pieces fit together.

You follow questions.

One finding creates another question. One contradiction sends you somewhere unexpected. One overlooked detail changes the way you see the entire problem.

You are skeptical without being cynical.

Precise without becoming rigid.

Curious without losing sight of the objective.

You don't collect facts to demonstrate how much you know.

You look for the facts that matter.

And you're always asking:

What does this tell us?

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

We are interested in people with strong research and analytical ability from a wide range of backgrounds.

You may come from market research, consumer insights, consulting, competitive intelligence, economics, business research, journalism, data analysis, academia, marketing, or another research-intensive discipline.

You should know how to find credible information, evaluate sources, analyze evidence, synthesize findings, and communicate what you discovered clearly.

Strong writing is important.

Attention to detail is important.

Intellectual curiosity is essential.

You should be comfortable working independently when necessary and equally comfortable having your conclusions questioned.

We care less about whether you already know a particular industry.

We care whether you know how to learn one.

WHAT THIS IS NOT

This is not data entry.

It is not simply compiling articles.

It is not copying statistics into slides.

It is not producing pages of information nobody will use.

And it is not research designed to validate a conclusion someone has already decided to make.

At JOSEPH, research exists in service of a strategic question.

That means knowing when we have enough information.

Knowing when we don't.

Knowing what evidence would change our thinking.

And knowing when something we've discovered is important enough to change the direction of the work.

WHY JOSEPH

Research sits close to strategy at JOSEPH.

You will not conduct an analysis, send it somewhere else, and never know what happened to it.

You will see how your work enters the strategic conversation.

You'll see which findings survive scrutiny.

Which ones change the hypothesis.

Which ones alter the recommendation.

And which ones ultimately influence the client's decision.

You will work directly with the people developing the strategy and increasingly be expected to contribute your own interpretation of what the evidence means.

Research isn't underneath the thinking here.

It is part of the thinking.

HOW YOU'LL GROW

The goal is not simply to make you faster at finding information.

It is to develop your judgment about information.

What should we investigate?

Which sources should we trust?

What are we missing?

Which pattern is meaningful?

What evidence would challenge our current hypothesis?

When should we keep looking?

When do we know enough to make a decision?

Those are increasingly strategic questions.

As your judgment develops, your responsibility will grow with it—from gathering evidence, to interpreting it, to identifying insights, to helping shape the strategic argument itself.

Where that ultimately takes you depends partly on you.

You may become an exceptional research specialist.

You may grow toward strategy.

Both paths matter.

COMPENSATION

JOSEPH intends to attract exceptional people and compensate them accordingly.

Compensation for this position will be competitive and commensurate with experience, capabilities, and the scope of responsibility.

Specific compensation and benefits will be discussed during the interview process and reflected in the final offer as applicable.

LOCATION

JOSEPH is based in Orange County, California.

The nature of our work requires close collaboration with firm leadership, colleagues, and clients. Specific working arrangements and expectations will be discussed during the interview process.

ABOUT JOSEPH

JOSEPH is a strategic marketing advisory firm.

We help leadership make the choices that shape positioning, customers, competition, and growth.

We work upstream of execution—where the problem is defined, priorities are established, tradeoffs are made, and direction is determined.

Our job is not to add complexity.

It is to reduce it.

Know Your Move.