Learning from case studies

Home > Subject areas > Studying business > Learning from case studies

Much of the responsibility for learning from case studies rests with you. If you are studying as part of a formal course, then you will benefit from a tutor who can guide you by identifying appropriate cases to use at different stages and for different topics within your strategic marketing course. Where case studies are discussed in class, the tutor will encourage participation and the evaluation of alternative proposals, but will not usually provide an ‘answer’. The tutor generally facilitates a case study class by encouraging people to summarise the discussion at appropriate points and leading the class through the following general process:

• What can we learn from this case study?
• What generalisations emerge from the case that can be carried forward to other cases?
• Was the approach we adopted to this case productive? Could it have been improved?
• What marketing concepts and techniques helped us to understand and analyse this case?

In the early stages of a course, when you have only limited experience of case analysis, you may feel a sense of frustration. Case discussions can seem disorganised and often fail to reach a clear conclusion. When dealing with strategic marketing case studies, the tutor will normally refrain from providing a ‘solution’, on the grounds that there is no single correct answer to a strategic marketing case study. This may be contrasted with the kinds of case study that are used, at an introductory level, in accounting and finance, for example. Such cases usually do have an answer, and you know whether you got it right or wrong. However, even in accounting and finance, as the cases become more complex and a better simulation of real world decision-making, it becomes ever-more difficult to provide a single right answer. In marketing you are unlikely ever to have the luxury of knowing that your proposed solution was clearly right. Even if you can follow up the case study company and establish that ‘their’ solution was very much what you had suggested yourself, this does not guarantee that it was ‘right’.

As you progress through your course, you will find that the process of case analysis becomes easier and seems much better organised. You will learn to tolerate the fact that there is no single right answer, and will find that you can present your own conclusions with great conviction, while understanding that others may come to different conclusions on the basis of the same data. Indeed, these are some of the very skills that the case study method of instruction is designed to teach you. The skills of developing a feasible solution, presenting it to a professional audience and defending it against reasoned attack are some of the most important skills for a marketing manager to possess.

This content has been taken from Contemporary Strategic Marketing by Ross Brennan, Paul Baines and Paul Garneau.