How to build a great case study

We've tried to make submitting a case study as simple as possible, but it may require you to think a little differently about the work you have done. Each case study contains four features:

Background to the business objective
How much the research influenced the business outcome
How much the research cost (a rough banding is fine)
The commercial impact - again a rough banding is fine and the metric can be anything you want it to be - sales, profit, market share.

We don't require proprietary financial information. And you don't even need to include the name of your brand (although we think it will give you kudos if you do). Just as long as you give us an idea of the sector or market, that will suffice.

Read below for some tips on how to construct your submission.

Contextualise your research commercially

Start with reframing your project in terms of the business outcomes it contributed to. For example, insight generation for advertising campaigns or creative evaluation work feeds into great marketing which drives sales. Directly and indirectly, your efforts will have contributed to the success of that campaign. It doesn't matter that your work was done 2 or 3 years before a product or service went to market: its contribution lives on.

Estimate your influence

How much each piece of research influenced the outcome will vary depending on the business question being addressed and where in the overall process it featured. It's useful to come up with a percentage, even if it's subjective. And don't worry if it's a very small number: that can often add up to a lot of money when the impact is measured!

Quantify the business outcomes

Get some numbers on sales, retention, profitability, share, new customer numbers ... whatever metric the business is tracking for the product line you contributed towards.

Estimate the research spend

Work out roughly how much was spent on all the research feeding into the business initiative. We'll only publish this as a broad banding but the more accurate the figure the better the ROI measure that we produce.

Calculate the ROI

This is something the team at B>B can do for you, but if you want to work it out for yourself it's pretty simple:

multiplying the business outcome in £££ x your research influence