We think we know how our brand is perceived. After all, we craft the messages. Pick the images. And even see how people react to and interact with it. But do we really know why they choose to engage with our brand?

Could there be a surprising disconnect between what we think of the brand and what our customers/clients think?

This really came into focus for me recently as I was working on a case study for a client. 

Differing views

An interesting thing happens when you talk with (interview) a customer for a case study. You may discover that their perceptions don’t quite line up with how you hope to position your brand.

In my recent experience, the brand I was working with wanted to focus on technology and innovation that help create community. Rather than repeat that back to us, the client wanted to focus on how competitive the price was. 

While it’s always good to have a competitive advantage, there is a real danger in being known as the ‘low-cost leader’. It can hamper your ability to innovate and then charge appropriately for those innovations. Worse yet, if price becomes the lead, it can turn your brand into a commodity. Yikes.

Is it worth it?

Is it still worth doing the case study? Absolutely. First of all, it gives you the opportunity to have an extended conversation with customers/clients. That gives you an invaluable opportunity to uncover emphasis and nuance that other forms of research may not be able to reveal.

Second, it gives you real evidence to share with everyone from marketing to sales. There can be a lot of debate about what the analytics tell you about your prospects. But it’s difficult to deny the hard truths of the customer’s actual words. Creating a case study can help you uncover these (uncomfortable) truths.

Third, you can control the outcome of the case study. In this situation, we can manage the emphasis that we give to price as the reason to choose the brand. And we can bring forward other customer quotes that help us support the brand position that we aspire to.

Fourth, you get an invaluable tool that can be used in a number of ways:

• It can be featured in a blog post

• Quotes can be pulled out to use as testimonials on your site

• Those quotes can also be used in social posts

• The case study can be sent as a pre-meeting sales warmer 

• It also works great as a sales meeting follow up

In my view, the lowly case study is an underappreciated brand tool. It can help you uncover some unvarnished truths (it’s an acid test). And unlike analytics or other research, it can also help you efficiently create a number of marketing and sales tools that can help you further your brand efforts.

It’s time to give case studies a little love.