Analyzing Cases

(the following material was derived, in part, from The Case Study Handbook by William Ellet)

A case, at its simplest level, is a real-world situation in which you, the marketing professional, are expected to use your critical thinking skills to figure out what to do. As in most real-world situations, you have neither enough information or time to really address the problem, and you also have a million other things going on at the same time. So rather than thrashing about aimlessly, this mini-guide is intended to give you a skeleton of an approach that may be useful in analyzing these cases.

The first step in any case analysis is to actively read the case. That means going through it carefully and making notes in the margins, highlighting, or whatever other methods you typically use to understand what is really going on in the case. Treat the case like a mystery novel – try to unravel the complex web of information (and sometimes disinformation) that is presented. Typically the cases will be tied to the chapter of the text we are currently reading, but that is not always the case. If appropriate, think about the principles we are discussing for that chapter and see if they apply to that particular case or not. The instructor (me) is not always good about fitting the cases and the chapters together, and these are general purpose cases not necessarily oriented to a Product Management course, so there may not be the perfect overlap that would happen in a perfect world, or somewhere like Harvard.

All cases are self-contained – all the information you need about the industry, the company, or the project are in the case itself – there is no need to go to any outside sources or do extensive web searches to get more information. In fact, going outside the case information will generally just cost you valuable time and aggravate the instructor (me)