How to write a case study

A marketing case study, the business kind that shows a customer’s result rather than an academic study of a subject, has four parts: the situation, the action taken, the result with a baseline and a period, and a quote from the client. Put the headline result on page one and keep the whole thing to about four pages.

Most case studies fail at the same sentence. Somewhere on page one there is a claim like “we transformed their operations”, and a reader who buys things for a living has already stopped, because there is nothing in it to check. The interesting question is not how to write the story. It is where to put the evidence so that a sceptic finds it before they give up.

The four parts

Situation, action, result, quote. Every workable case study is those four things, and the argument is only ever about proportion.

The finished case study on this site is about Brightline Logistics, an invented Adelaide freight company with 62 vehicles that moved from paper run sheets to in cab tablets. Every name and figure in it is made up. I counted the words in each block of the published document, and the split across the four parts is this: situation 128 words, action 224, result 179, quote 46. That is 577 words over four pages, of which the action gets 39 per cent and the situation gets 22.

That ratio is the useful finding. Writers reliably over invest in the situation, because it is the easy part to write, and under invest in the action, because describing what you actually did means admitting what was fiddly. Buyers want the opposite.

Situation: the client in two paragraphs

The example spends two paragraphs and nothing more. The first says who the client is in concrete terms: an Adelaide freight operator, 62 vehicles, running on paper. The second says what that cost them: lost dockets, manual data entry, no live view of where the trucks were.

Rules for this part. Name the constraint, not the emotion. Give the size of the operation, because a reader is silently checking whether this company resembles theirs. And do not introduce your own company here at all; you are not in this part of the story.

If the client is anonymous, replace the name with the specifics rather than removing them. “A 62 vehicle freight operator in South Australia” carries almost as much as a name.

Action: what you did, not what you sell

This is the longest part in the example, and it is split across three blocks: five named changes, a five phase rollout timeline with dates, and three things the client did right.

Splitting it that way is deliberate. The five changes are what the reader is buying. The timeline is how long it took, which is the second question every buyer asks. The three things the client did right are the part that makes the case study credible, because it stops being a story about your product and starts being a story about a project, which is what the reader is actually contemplating.

Write this part in the language of the client’s operations. “Jobs are sent to drivers’ in cab tablets, which removes paper run sheets” is an action. “Leveraged our platform’s dispatch module” is a product page sentence that has escaped.

Results: numbers with baselines and periods

A result with no baseline is not a result. “94 per cent fewer missed pickups” only means something next to “16 to 20 a week before, one to two after”, which is exactly what the example’s before and after table gives: six operational measures, a paper column and a digital column, side by side.

Three things every number needs. A baseline, so the reader knows what it moved from. A period, so they know over how long. And a source, even if the source is “the client’s own dispatch system”, so they know who counted.

Be careful about what you can stand behind. The ACCC’s position is that any claim a business makes must be accurate, truthful and based on reasonable grounds, and that claims about future matters need reasonable grounds at the time they are made. So a measured saving is fine; the same figure projected forward as what a new client will get is a different kind of claim and needs different evidence.

Quote and approval

One quote is enough, from the person who lived the change rather than the person who signed the contract. In the example it comes from the operations manager and it does something specific: it names a benefit the numbers do not capture, which is stress on the drivers and the operations team. That is the job of a quote. If it repeats a statistic, delete it. The same rule holds when a quote goes into a presentation: the pull quote slide example gives one participant’s line from a program evaluation a whole slide, without a name and with written consent.

Get approval in writing before publishing, and cover three things: the quote, the figures, and the use of the company name and logo. This is not just courtesy. The UK CAP Code requires marketers to hold documentary evidence that a testimonial or endorsement is genuine, and to keep contact details for whoever gave it, and it requires documentary evidence for objective claims generally. An email from the client approving the exact wording satisfies both in one step.

Charts and stats blocks

Documents built here carry six chart types and four layouts for a block of key figures. Which to use is decided by the claim, not by taste.

Claim	Use
One measure moved over the project	Line
Two states of the same measure	Bar
Ranked items with long labels	Horizontal bar
A cumulative total building up	Area
Share of a whole, few slices	Pie or donut
Three or four headline figures	Key values, stats layout

The example uses the stats layout for four figures on page one, 94 per cent fewer missed pickups, 11 hours of admin saved a week, $184,000 a year and a 4.6 month payback, and then a single line chart of on time delivery rate by month across the six month rollout, with the axis labelled and the period in the caption. One chart, one claim. A case study with four charts is usually one that could not decide what it proved.

Length and format

Four pages is a good target and two is fine. Keep the results visible from the first page, because that is the page most readers give you.

Format follows use. If it is going to be attached to a proposal or emailed to a procurement team, a document is right, and the document maker with charts is set up for exactly this shape. If it is going to be presented, the slide version is a different build with one number per slide. If the case study exists to support a bid, the companion post on how to write a business proposal covers where it goes in the pack.

The example

Read it for the proportions rather than the prose. Four figures before any narrative, two paragraphs of situation, three separate blocks of action, one table, one chart, one quote, and an outcome paragraph that repeats the headline numbers with the period attached. Nothing in it is longer than its job.