In business to business marketing, the case study is king. For my business, Articulate Marketing, it’s also vital, regular work. I have written over a hundred case studies for big tech companies over the past couple of years. I think they’re pretty good considering the constraints on the process.
Symptoms
But when I stand back and look at case studies in general (not just mine!) from a ‘Bad Language’ perspective, I can see a number of problems:
- They are lifeless. You get little sense of person or place.
- They are formulaic: problem, solution, benefits.
- There is no story. No feeling of tension, suspense, progress.
- The results are hard to measure.
On a practical note:
- They take too long. A typical case study might take a month or so from initial lead to final delivery. Why? Each case study typically goes through 10-15 distinct steps.
- They are expensive. It costs a lot of money to manage the whole process. Actually doing the interview and writing the story can account for as little as half the total cost.
Diagnosis
Having been through the process of creating them for a number of big tech companies, I think the problems lie in the way they are created:
- Too many cooks. Some of the case studies I write get reviewed and edited by at least seven people. This is like taking a designer shirt and washing seven times before you can wear it – the colour is going to fade!
- Too many steps. For one client, I have a tracking spreadsheet that ticks off 11 discrete steps in finalising a case study. Each one requires a few emails, some uploads, some checking and, of course, some cost.
- Overzealous brand policing. Typical feedback: “You can’t say that in a case study, it’s too informal.” “All headlines have to be ten words long but can’t mention the customer or product by name.”
- One size fits all. No sense of different audiences and different media – what works online for a customer is different from what works by email for a journalist.
- No pipeline. Gathering case study candidates should start before deals are done. Similarly, relying on resellers to provide leads only works if a broad selection of resellers participate. In practice, a handful of companies provide the majority of leads (to their greater glory but at the expense of diversity).
- Over-loaded content. Typically, clients want 500 word case studies but they also want them freighted with a paragraph about the product, a paragraph about the reseller who implemented it, a paragraph about the customer then details of the problem and the benefits. It’s too crowded in there.
- Unrealistic expectations. A marketing manager’s wet dream is that every case study ends with this sentence: “Because we installed Widgetiser 3.0, my company saved £2m in three months and increased sales by 128%.” The real world doesn’t generate statistics like that.
Treatment
- Remember the audience. I wrote some case studies for an ecommerce company. They were 1,000 words long but I was only allowed to mention the product in one paragraph. The rest of the piece had to be a proper story designed to appeal to the company’s target audience. In terms of PR coverage, these case studies were – by far – the most successful I have worked on. Why? Because journalists could see the point and people actually wanted to read them.
- New delivery media. What about a customer evidence blog? How about turning the source interview into a five minute podcast? Perhaps combine three or four case studies in a particular sector, say accounting, into a single feature article about technology in that sector. What about the Q&A format? Put the interview up on YouTube?
- One case study, multiple presentations.The source interview and research don’t change, but perhaps I could write a traditional case study, a bullet point summary for the web, a killer quote for an email newsletter and a longer more journalistic story for PR purposes. The incremental cost of the extra writing is marginal compared the cost of going through the process to produce the basic case study. Twice the content for 50 percent more money. (I’ve just finished doing something like this for one client. We generated a booklet, some quotes and a number of case studies from the same pool of interviews.)
- More journalism, more story. Clients say that they want writing with fizz and ginger. They want something that reads like The Economist of the FT. But when I actually write something sparkling, they try to dull it down again; afraid that informality or originality might offend. It’s like turning My Fair Lady back into Pygmalion. The antidote is to have a little courage.
- Build a database. I use BaseCamp as an extranet to allow everyone involved – client and agency – to access my work. This means that past case studies are always available and searchable.
- Automate the candidate gathering. I have developed a protoype online form that lets case study candidates self-select, review and agree to the legal process and give me the information I need to start the process. It’s early days – we’ve had about a dozen submissions in a couple of months – but it promises to cut out several steps in the process and catch more potential customers.
- Build in measurability. Too often, people seem to think that the end of the process is getting the case study signed off and uploaded to a central customer evidence website. To me, it feels like that is only the beginning of the process. It must be possible to build in more measurability. For example, I can see exactly how many people come to my blog each day and what they look at. Perhaps the same can be done for case studies.
- Automate interview booking. Inside a company, you can use Outlook and Exchange to see when people are free and then send a meeting request. I would love – LOVE – to find a similar system that would let people book up interviews with me; at times when I am free and which suit them. Currently this takes perhaps one or two phone calls and a couple of emails to sort out. Automating this process would be genius.
It is possible to rescue customer evidence from the clutches of boredom and bureaucracy. It’ll take a bit of technology, some imagination and lots of good writing.
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Matthew,
I had a great big laugh when I saw this posting. I had nightmares last year on a case study project for exactly the reasons you stated. I wanted to create something with some life to it and stay off the problem, solution, benefit treadmill. I ended up using that framework – but tried to keep it in the background as a way to create structure without feeling boxed in. Great work on this blog. Keep up the great work. All of us drones around the world owe you a debt of gratitude.
cheers,
rp
Spot on with all this. One I’d add to the list of symptoms is a lack of authenticity. Customers place greater trust in a story which is realistic about the challenges confronted. No-one expects everything to be plain sailing. So be realistic about issues and offer advice on how to overcome them. Credibility in the eyes of the customer will increase enormously. But it takes a very brave client to leave anything in a draft with even a slight tinge of negativity.
btw – on measurability we have built systems for IT companies that can link the use of evidence / references, to deals infuenced and revenue value. It is hard, but possible.
Good feedback from both Richard and Steve; guys I know that both work in the same field and deal with the same challenges; in some cases for the same clients. Because I think that criticising ‘the system’ and changing it is very difficult on a company-wide basis, the most likely route for improvement is going to come from the margins. Bold mid-level managers running small projects that ask for forgiveness rather than for permission. If they succeed and the landscape changes, everyone will take it for granted but we’ll know how and why things changed …
Matthew:
I’ve written more case studies than I can even count, and I think the crux of the problem is the formulaic fanaticism imposed by marketing “experts” in an effort to dumb down case studies and make them easier to scan.
Case studies should be held to the standards of good journalism and tell a story. That includes acknowledgement that sometimes there are bumps along the road and things that didn’t go as planned.
All too often, the humanity of the story is completely overlooked in favor lifeless fatuous non-information such as “When ABC company decided to implement a new — insert high tech thingy here – program, they turned to Whizbang Technology Solutions because of Whizbang’s tiered solution, blah, blah, blah.”
In virtually every tech case study I’ve researched, at its heart was an innovative (and usually harried) engineer whose creativity and determination made the success story a reality. The story would have been exactly the same whether his company used Whizbang’s product or similar products from any of Whizbang’s competitors.
When writers are allowed to go with the story, the result is usually a far more interesting and compelling. As a side benefit, such a story is more likely to be picked up in a trade magazine with all the attendant credibility.
The benefits to the company of telling a good story are legion. Yet, the objective seems to be the accumulation of cookie-cutter problem/solution/benefit pdfs that few will ever have the desire or stamina to read.
I agree with Bruce. It’s often the case that activity gets measured, not progress.
I always enjoy your posts, Matthew, but this one in particular. I write a monthly customer newsletter for a global high-tech company. They contracted me for my journalism background but after client review, the articles end up a variation of the press release for fear of deviation. You offer a few excellent tips for changing this process–thanks!
The pipeline problem is a tough nut.
A colleage was a tireless case study hunter — keeping up with user groups, listservs, the internal help desk, product development, beta testers, and the sales force — constantly cultivating relationships and planting seeds. She developed her own case study pipeline in much the same way a good sales rep does it.
She was a well connected internal person who dedicated a lot of her time to the pipeline, and kept it full.
This was worlds better than having to rely on sales reps, resellers, and others who are totally focused on something else; i.e., their real jobs.
How about review committees who change customers’ quotes because they don’t like the way said customers have expressed themselves? Coming from a journalism background, I get particularly tense over that one. (I always change them right back.)
As for automating the interview booking, check this out:
http://www.24hrassistant.com/
(It’s owned by a friend of mine.)
Karen:
A corporate lawyer used to try to get me to put trademarks in customer quotes: “We find Whizbang(R) to be very useful.”
I told her that real people don’t actually say trademarks out loud when they talk. She disagreed.
I ignored her, too. This went on for ten years.
We now return you to the real world.
Writers often confuse “case study” with “feature article”. These are different beasts.
You can’t evaluate case studies based on the standards we uphold for fully-reported features. If you do, then you should also evaluate police reports the same way.
Internal studies at F500 companies that I have written for show the format many marketing and PR departments use (bio/problem/solution/benefits) is IDEAL for its intended audience, because it gives the audience what they want: FACTS, in an easy to read, quickly digested format.
A busy C-level executive doesn’t want or have time to read a full-blown feature. They don’t give a hoot about a great lede, nut, or kicker. Quotes don’t matter (other than to serve as an endorsement). Trademarks are ignored.
About the only things that matter, creatively, are the hed, dec, and a callout — if only to pull the readers in, and provide the story in a nutshell — because we can assume they won’t read further.
These readers want a one-sheet that nutshells the pertinent details, and helps them quickly make a decision.
This urge to turn case studies into features is caused by “writeritis”, the analog to “artdesigneritis”. Artdesigneritis occurs when an art director presents a layout that looks great hung on the wall, but is unreadable because it uses 6 point gray sans serif type on a black background for body copy.
The object is to communicate. Sometimes, to communicate, we need to boil things down to something other than fine prose. Part of being a great copywriter is knowing when and how to write for mediums other than the feature article.
Can a case study be 5-10 words? You bet it can — when it needs to be on a billboard.
RBL’s comments are very well-made and interesting. Thank you. Perhaps I do suffer from writer-itis.
I agree that structure, format and consistency can make information much more readily understood.
However, I think that this blog (and certainly other work that I have done for ‘F500′ clients including HP, Microsoft and eBay) shows that I am not afraid of brevity, structure or an enemy of ‘easy to read and quickly digested’.
I’m certainly not arguing that a 500 word case study should be turned into a 1500 word feature. Actually, I often have to persuade clients that their case studies should be shorter.
It seems to me that the main job of a case study is persuasion not communication. It says “buy our product because other people like you bought it to solve problems like the one you have.” The better you make the argument, the better the case study. A little fizz and ginger in the writing, such as a sense of place and person or human quotes, can only help.
Anyhow, my whingeing aside, I still write problem, solution, benefit case studies on a weekly basis. Why? Because that’s what I get paid for. Perhaps it’s the Stockholm syndrome – we’ve all fallen in love with the format.
Re: online appointments. I am using 24goto, their demo might have too many features but you could request a free trial anytime and have them customize it for you.
http://24goto.24hoursonline.com/test-it-now.html
There is also mindbodyonline.com but it wasn’t the right thing for me. A little bit too expensive and somehow too complicated.
I think writers get hung up on the words, “case study”. It’s interesting that Microsoft (who I too have written for) moved away from calling them case studies, preferring “customer evidence” instead. That wording best describes their use and purpose: to interest the media in any reporting potential, and to endorse claims made by salespersons. I doubt anyone ever made a buying decision based on a case study. But confidence in making buying decisions is bolstered every day through their use. I see them as little more than on-the-record endorsements — and I think readers see them that way, too.
Microsoft may be doing more than renaming case studies. They may recognize an important rhetorical distinction, one forgotten by many marketing and PR departments. Case studies differ from “customer evidence” and from feature stories by intention, object, method, and presentation. A case study is a research report, not a feature story, not a “customer success story.” To understand the intention of a case study, I suggest this link: http://www.hbs.edu/case/
Case studies ought to provide proxy experience for the reader. In this sense, the intention of a case study is identical to that of a feature story. But while features aim to produce an emotional effect, case studies aim to provide proxy experience. Case studies allow executives to “war game” scenarios in their organizations. A case study may be the only writing product that can do that.
Case studies do not report on people or products or companies. Case studies report on a particular attempt to USE people, products, and companies to achieve a particular END. Case studies are always particular and always focused on means and ends. Because case studies are particular, any attempt to turn them into general marketing tools is an error.
Case studies are historical documents, so the methods of historical research are best for producing them. Case studies present proxy experience. The reader should be asking questions. “Was that the right thing to do?” “What if I did that?” “What if my competitors did that?” “What if they had XXX instead of YYY?” The case study should provide enough information for the reader to mentally work out what would likely happen. Naturally, people have different experiences, and they answer questions differently. Different answers turn naturally into a direct discussion of ways and means in the reader’s particular circumstances.
A good case study is written and presented to make this transition from proxy experience to real situation fast, easy, and natural. Case studies are essentially good history. Their methods and writing style should reflect their nature.
In my view, marketing and PR departments have misapplied the name ‘case study’ to marketing products. Why? Because they want the gravitas of research — without the messy complications.
My two cents.
This is an extraordinary thread of comments. You have really got to grips with the nature and purpose of case studies. I have found it really instructive and insightful. Thank you!
I’m really interested in Jeff’s analysis of the case study. I’m not sure that companies want to go to the extent of a Harvard Business School case study; but I am tempted to agree that the term has been borrowed by marketing/PR to lend dignity to what would otherwise be an endorsement.
I also really like his idea that a case study his more history than journalism. I studied history and there’s something impressive about the best historical writers: reverence for data combined with the imaginative ability of a story teller. I’m reading NAM Rodger’s Safeguard of the Sea and that’s a good example of what I’m talking about.
Interestingly, I hear Microsoft call their ‘case studies’ customer evidence all the time; but in my experience they rarely or never depart from the traditional case study format. This is especially true of material destined for their global case study database. I have sometimes had to rewrite or edit work to conform to the standard format in order to get it approved.
“I would love – LOVE – to find a similar system that would let people book up interviews with me; at times when I am free and which suit them.”
Have you tried Google Calendar (calendar.google.com)? It integrates quite nicely with Gmail and like Gmail it is a free service. You can share your calendar with others or just a subset of it (eg, create and share a “work” calendar.)
I’ve certainly enjoyed reading your Bad Language, keep up the great write!
Cheers,
Josh Adams
With the diary thing, it really needs to integrate with the Microsoft Outlook calendar I use everyday. I’ve experimented extensively with Google Calendar and integrating it with Outlook but it doesn’t quite get there.
Nice article that tickled my mind – and as a non-professional in this field it does help to get some insight into how you guys work.
On the calendar side, try http://www.bookingcalendar.com as it does the Outlook integration that you are after
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