Adapted from Bernhardt & Kinnear (1988). Cases in marketing management, pp. 6-16.
Plano, TX: Business Publications, Inc.

Pay careful attention to the following points. They are often used by instructors to evaluate either a written or oral analysis.

1. Be complete. Each area of the situation analysis must be discussed, problems and opportunities identified, alternative presented and evaluated using the situation analysis and relevant financial analysis, and a decision must be made. An analysis that omits part of the situation analysis or only recognizes one alternative is not a good analysis. Second, each area must be covered in-depth and within insight.

2. Avoid rehashing case facts. Every case has a lot of factual information. A good analysis uses facts that are relevant to the situation at hand to make summary points of analysis. A poor analysis just restates or rehashes theses facts without making relevant summary comments.

3. Make reasonable assumptions. Every case is incomplete in terms of some piece of information that you would like to have. A good case analysis must make realistic assumptions to fill in the gaps of information in the case. For example, the case may not describe the purchase decision process for the product of interest. A poor analysis would either omit mentioning this or just state that no information is available. A good analysis would attempt to present this purchase decision process by classifying the product and drawing upon real life experience. Could you not describe the purchase decision process for a bike, even though you have never read a research report about it?

4. Don’t confuse symptoms with problems. In summarizing an agency’s problems a poor analysis confuses the symptoms with real problems. For example, one might list two problems as (1) sales are down and (2) employee turnover is high. This would not be