How to get great case studies for your brand.

MMT Digital’s “TOBi” for Vodafone earned high-profile media coverage in 2018-2019

Case Studies are perhaps the single most important piece of marketing collateral a businesses needs in order to do PR. So why don’t all brands focus on them, and what should they do to get more of them?

When is a case study not a PR case study? When it's a marketing case study.

The first thing to say is that I'm not against marketing or sales case studies. 

They are incredibly valuable.

💡 They give authority on a topic, proof you can walk the talk

💡 They illustrate and explain how you create value through real-world examples, putting numbers on a solution

💡 They create social proof, evidence that others will back you in public.

A sales prospect will probably want evidence to support a buying decision. Behavioural science teaches us that human beings make emotional decisions but require reason to post-rationalise them. 

Having great metrics, proof points that explain how much time/ money a product or service can create or save can support that decision, whether that's a decision to go with an established name as a safety choice, justify a gamble on a challenger brand, or support a business case for the budget holder or procurement department. 

But PR-ready case studies are different, because journalists want slightly different things than sales prospects. 

Why getting 'official' case studies is hard.

Getting any official case study or testimonial can be hard work.

When I was working in corporate comms at the BBC one executive nicknamed me Dr No, partly as I wasn't able to approve a vendor's written case study or approve the exec's appearance at (yet another) conference. His vendor partners natuarlly wanted to leverage the BBC brand, while the exec wanted to showcase the brilliant work his team (in partnership with the vendor) but that was BBC policy. 

This was partly due to fairness. Big companies like the BBC work with literally thousands of vendors, partners, producers every year. If they said yes to everyone they'd be approving case study releases all day rather than dealing with the latest 'crisis' (in-house PRs at big firms spend a lot of time diffusing multiple PR reputation bombs, that's before they get started on the proactive stuff). 

Approvals can also be hard to come by, due to the issue of metrics, and commercial sensitivity. Releasing data that shows Corporation A saved $5m by streamlining Widget Inc's recruitment processes (for example) may raise questions from investors as to why so much money was being 'wasted' in the first place. 

"I'm sure that will be fine, just let me run it past the corporate PR team" can be a death notice for case studies and awards for this reason.

The good news - you may not even need a 'case study'.

But there are workarounds to this issue. And I’ve since worked a number of vendors on the other side of the tracks to make coverage happen.

Whilst working with MMT Digital, a digital transformation consultancy, a few years ago, my client and I put huge effort into surfacing a particular piece of work, despite not having an official case study and explicit refusal from the corporate brand's PR team. They had been told point blank that they were not even allowed to carry the company's logo, or refer to a relationship of any sorts, on their website (despite other agencies seemingly doing so…).

But what we did have was an ambitious user-buyer at the brand who had the guts to take a 'beg forgiveness, rather than ask permission' approach internally and saw this project as a flagship piece of work he wanted to make public, both to raise his own profile in the industry, and showcase the great work his own team had done.

So working with the client we first got agreement to use the case study in an award application, before we engineered a conference appearance where the spokesperson would be 'asked questions' from the floor that he could reactively answer - and go beyond the agreed line.

We pre-briefed a journalist who we knew would be at the event and arranged a quick interview for after the presentation. And because the journalist knew my client had worked on the brief, they got a few mentions in the initial coverage. This opened the door for multiple further pieces of coverage, as the initial report had put the work into the public domain.

An appearance by a spokesperson at an industry conference helped overcome a robust corporate ‘no case study’ policy that had blocked media coverage.

This coverage was the best the agency had had in years, and could easily not have happened, had we taken no for an answer. 

So what's the learning?

My digital agency client didn't need to prove they were 17.2% better, or certified experts in implementing the Drupal CMS, they needed to show the world that a household technology brand trusted them to deliver on what was then a ground-breaking innovation through earned media.  

Which is good, because journalists don't care about product bells, widgets, features, and buttons. They don't really care how technology works, only how it makes people's lives better. And to tell that story, they want fresh stories from people, much more than data points on a pretty pdf (that every other journalist has also got).

There's a bit more to the story. The product was great, and a good example of primitive AI, but that in itself didn't swing it - we anchored the message not in the product problem/ solution (ie why Technology A is better than Technology B) but in the societal/ business/ category level problem (which had been poor customer service). Journalists want to tell wider stories about what matters in their audiences’ world - not promote a product’s feature set. 

So my top tip would be to look across your entire history of work you've done across all clients with a fresh eye. 

Ask which clients like us the most? Who will speak up? Who is at the biggest brand? How can this solution be anchored in a wider context? What is topical?

Download this form for some further guidance on how to do a case study audit - if you complete and return I'll happily advise you on how you can convert it into great earned media coverage.