As a management student, you are often thrown with several case studies in every course, including marketing. The dilemma that I feel the students often faced is how to approach a particular marketing case study. In this chapter, I will give a small overview of how to solve or analyse any given marketing case study.
Let us start by understanding what are marketing case studies and what are the elements of marketing case study. I will also discuss different types of marketing case studies and provide an overview of the marketing case analysis structure.
What are marketing case studies?
A case is a verbal representation of any organisation or a specific component. The possibilities are typically based on real-life situations and occurrences, sometimes with a bit of disguise of identities of persons, corporations, and physical areas.
Any case scenario revolves around an issue that a company/industry is facing. While solving a case, you will be placed in a situation where you must determine whether or not to perform market research, what type of research to conduct, and how to evaluate the results.
The basic idea of a case study is to allow students like you to take on the position of CEO (or, in some instances, consultant), make the appropriate judgments, and defend his/her suggestions.
Elements of Marketing Case Study
Let us now focus on what are the elements of a marketing case study. A case study is typically a detailed study of the success of a tool, approach, or strategy in marketing. It emphasises measurable objectives such as increased revenue, visits, or production hours.
The elements of the marketing case study are shown below.
Types of Marketing Case Studies
There are different types of marketing case studies that are usually discussed or asked in the interviews. However, we can categorise them broadly into three broad groups based on the case structure.
Now, let us look at each of these groups in detail.
- Third-person/Client Case Study: These case studies showcase a specific client's experience working with or using your product.
- Explanatory Case Studies: These case studies examine the effects of phenomena or approaches, such as a company's marketing strategy and how it influenced its growth. It's based on observation and inference rather than first-hand experience in this situation.
- Implementation Case Studies: An implementation case study goes a step farther than a typical client case study, concentrating on and detailing the actual implementation.
Marketing Case Study Analysis
You must be wondering why do we even need to analyse marketing case studies or why is analysing a marketing case study challenging. Refer to the e-book to further learn about marketing case studies.
A marketing case study analysis do not have a fixed framework or strategy. However, a structured approach will always help you systematically analyse any marketing case study. Below are some of the points that I will recommend for systematically approaching any marketing case:
Way Ahead
Now that you have got an overview of what are marketing case studies and what are the elements of marketing case study. We have also discussed the different types of marketing case studies in brief.
In the next two chapters, we will focus on how do you approach a marketing case study and how do you answer a marketing case study. In the later stages of this block, we will discuss the marketing case analysis structure in detail and which kind of analysis or framework might help in certain situations while presenting any case. Lastly, we will conclude by analysing a few marketing case study examples.
