Three Reasons to Include Warts in Your Case Studies

Case studies are terrific marketing communications tools. They’re great for validating the effectiveness of a vendor’s product by showing how real customers use their products in their business and how these customers are achieving success. Moreover, survey after survey shows that IT buyers find customer stories highly credible and convincing.

Yet often, when I actually talk to customers, I find that despite the fact that the customer is generally pleased with the product, the road to success is never free of potholes. Perhaps the implementation got off to a rocky start. Perhaps the customer themselves didn’t do a very good job of defining goals for the project. Perhaps key users never got on board with using the product.   

Sometimes these problems are severe enough that the customer ultimately refuses to complete the case study. But many times, the customer is happy overall, but can’t resist the urge to air their views in the hopes that their complaints will make it back to the company.

Now if a trade publication were to write the story, it would include some of these challenges in the story along with its descriptions of the benefits in the interest of providing a balanced account--assuming there was a modicum of separation between ad sales and editorial. Such balanced stories are more credible. However, most vendors would never dream of reporting anything negative about their product—indeed, only once in my more than 25 years of writing marketing communications pieces for technology companies has a client ever told me, “We want something less promotional and more even handed.”

This position is understandable. Vendors want to avoid saying anything negative because:

· Competitors might get hold of the copy and quote it out of context

· Customers may see something negative that they might not have thought about otherwise

· Customers themselves may not want anything negative to appear for fear that it would somehow make their IT people look bad

But one can also make the argument that companies should adopt a more journalistic approach and risk exposing some of their warts.

Why?

One of the key reasons vendors create case studies is to build trust and credibility. Yet, technology products are notorious for rolling out with flaws. For example, ERP implementations routinely come out late and over budget. As a result, buyers have grown extremely skeptical of vendor claims. And while they pay attention to what other customers say in their case studies, they’re not going to check their skepticism at the door even when they read a case study. They still ask themselves, “What’s the catch?” And, if they’re serious enough prospects, they’ll want to call the customer highlighted in the case study and ask them for the real scoop.

But by bringing some of the challenges that the customer faced in the implementation process out in the open, your company can benefit in three ways:

1.    You can begin to build trust because customers will feel you’re being honest with them.

2.    By bringing up issues yourself, you have the opportunity to fully present your point of view about how you responded to the issue. After all, customers expect there to be problems when implementing software, what’s even more important to them is that their vendor is responsive enough to partner with them to make sure any issues are resolved properly.

3.    You’ll keep your company more honest and responsive. If your company knows that case studies will include a less than perfectly varnished version of the truth, perhaps it will spur people in your company on to do a better job of resolving problems for your customers on a consistent basis. 

Over the long run, that will result in better products, better service, happier customers—and more credible stories all around.

Has your company ever published unpleasant truths in your case studies?

Comments

[Casey Hibbard]

Hi Cheryl,

Great post! This is an increasingly hot topic. You make an important point about the potential customer taking the 100% happy story with a grain of salt.

To address this, sometimes I create a "Lessons Learned" section of the story that highlights some of the challenges faced. It's one way of giving the story more balance.

Thanks!

[term paper writers]

I easily get nice & updated information for research purposes... I'd definitely appreciate the work of the said blog owner... Thanks!

[Cheryl Goldberg]

Casey,
I really like your idea of a "Lessons Learned" section. Thanks!
Cheryl

[Haze Him]

Good post :)

[Submit Your Bitch]

Good ideas over here!