Page 69 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

28 THE CASE OF THE
MISSING CASE STUDY

I spend a lot of time telling you to focus on benefits in your
copywriting. And it’s true, benefits make the sale. However, you
can bring your benefits to life with a case study. Case studies take
time and effort to write. But the impact they make on your website,
brochure, or sales pack repays the effort many times over. Why?
Because your reader, rightly, perceives the case study as the truth.

Here is where you give them disinterested testimony that your
product or service works. Best of all, case studies follow many of the
rules of storytelling. You have a protagonist (hero)—your customer. A
predicament—the problem or challenge they were facing. A narrative—
what you did and why. And a climax—how things turned out.

The idea

From the British Standards Institution (BSI)
A while back I wrote a series of case studies for the BSI that
highlighted different areas of their expertise. Each one was targeted
at a particular market, and aimed to promote a specific area of
expertise. One of the most interesting to write, and I hope to read,
was for a Publicly Available Standard (PAS) for vehicle breakdown
and recovery.

The client was SURVIVE, a partnership between the motoring
industry, motoring services organizations, the Police Service, and
Government. Its aim was to improve the safety of breakdown and
recovery operators’ employees and customers. In partnership with
the BSI, it created a rigorous safety standard in six months.

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