Sure Thing in Marketing

MBA students tend to complain about cases they are asked to analyze as if they are auditioning for the New York Times review staff. The cases, MBAs lament, are rife with vagueness, poorly organized, pitifully deficient on key information, riddled with irrelevant details, hopelessly ambiguous, and written in dense and boring prose. And most of these cases are written about a management problem from some other generation - maybe even the 20th century. Adding insult to injury, the professor refuses to give much direction on what she is looking for when grading weekly submissions.

So, MBAs often resort to uninspired prescriptions: Let's hire a snarky copy writer, establish a Twitter following, and create some wicked edgy advertising that breaks through the clutter.

Not so fast. Cases, an important tool for learning, simulate (generously) what you might actually find in a work environment when faced with a challenge. Cases are akin to colleagues who haven't given you all the information you need or want, either because they haven't gotten around to getting it, didn't think it was necessary, or misunderstood the objective. In many ways, cases are superior to co-workers' written reports that barely qualify as English. Case exhibits may indeed be obtuse, but an argument could be made that they are significantly better than the data you end up chasing down from vendors located in inconvenient time zones. Lacking case data can be thought of as analogous to the paucity of resources at many firms that stymie market research efforts or the lack of access to competitive data. So make the best of what you have - cases - that are a compilation of what you (mostly) need to make reasoned management decisions. Cases may not be perfect, but the learning is immeasurable once you understand that cases are not meant to be complete encapsulations of facts that lead logically to clear recommendations but a simulation of the difficulties that bog down managers when reality happens. Here are some tips on analyzing and writing up a marketing case.

I. Analysis

Beginning. Figure on reading the case from beginning to end at least twice. On first read, take in the big picture but pay close attention to the details. The goal of the first reading is to gain a good sense of the tensions in the case. Usually, cases are not explicit about where the challenges lie. Seemingly incidental details are strewn throughout the case like charming irrelevancies or decorative flourishes. Often times, the challenges are in these details. Pay attention to financial data, summaries of quantitative information, and casual mentions of numerical details, both in the text of the case as well as in the exhibits. These aren't necessarily key pieces of information, but often they are in the case for a reason. As you do your first read, circle and highlight the clues you may want to return to. Jot down notes to yourself in the margins and do the back-of-the-envelope calculations (ratios, margins, markups, share, profits, discounts, per-customer expenditures) that may be useful when you do your second read.

Mulling. Once you have an initial grasp of the case, take the opportunity to mull over the issues gleaned from your first reading. In time, you will find yourself puzzling over steak sauce usage occasions and opportunities for allergy drugs while you are in the shower, or during yoga, or when shaving. This is an important step. Your most important objective is to put yourself in the shoes of the consumer. What does this person get from the product or service? What can this product or service deliver that no other can? What is the value the consumer derives from this product or service? What drives usage? All of these questions are different ways of asking the same thing. If you don't have an intuitive sense of this, I would suggest asking people you know. If you are a vegetarian thinking about A.1. Steak Sauce, ask steak-eaters about what a steak means to them. (Yes, you are exploring psycho-emotional attachments and you should be prepared to ask deep questions.) If you are a man researching the Venus razor, ask women why they shave and whether it makes them feel femininely nubile or enslaved. If you have never suffered from allergies but need to find out about Zyrtec, ask your pharmacist about what she observes among sufferers. And when you think you have gone deep, go deeper. Think about the profoundly encoded behaviors that drive the mammalian brain. Consider sex, class, status, anxiety, shame, fear, loathing, loyalty, superiority, family, jealousy, insecurity, passion, guilt, motherhood, fatherhood, culture, politics, Oedipus, etc. While these don't always pay off, you may be surprised how much leverage you can get from turning over these themes with regard to your consumer of interest.

Hypothesizing. Once you have mulled, start with a few hypotheses of what you believe is the problem to profitable growth. This will help you to understand what will then drive growth. Marketing is all about driving growth, so this is the essential question. Be clear about whether you are going to focus on a problem of growth and diagnosing it properly or whether you are considering how to accelerate growth. If the key challenge is about an obstacle to growth, generate a few hypotheses about what is the