McKinsey Makes a Good Case

"Deciding how aggressively to push the new offers proved difficult."

-McKinsey & Company

Writing about strategy is hard work. What is even harder is making a complex solution easy for non-specialists to understand and appreciate. McKinsey & Company associate principals Ari Buchalter and Humam Sakhnini show how it's done in a just-published case study "Fighting Cannibalization." It works on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin.

First the overview: The case is about how marketing executives can apply the same kinds of optimization tools typically used to solve operations problems (like production schedules). Specifically, marketers can balance the mix between high profit/lower-revenue versions of their products or services against substitutable offerings that earn lower unit profits but sell a lot more.

There are some good lessons here for anyone writing a case about a complex solution who has the goal of selling similar solutions to others.

The writer says just enough. This case is just under 400 words; yet, it could have easily been thousands. The authors accomplish their objective by leaving much unsaid. For example, they gloss over the complexity that there are actually multiple tradeoffs that marketers need to make to avoid cannibalization. There's the tradeoffs between product A profits and product B profits. But there is also the tradeoff between product A profit and product A marketshare -- and likewise for product B. They don't say what specific quantitative techniques were employed. They reference a class of techniques, but don't say which ones were actually used, never mine discuss the actual analysis. They also don't say if there were any issues that could not be mathematically modeled. For example, were there long-term relationships with key suppliers or customers that might be affected by a decision to cut back or increase sales of either offering?

In other words, the authors wet your appetite for more information and make a case that looks very credible. And that's all they really need to do. More detail would not have added "punch" to the story -- at least not for the intended audience of high-level generalists. On the contrary, added detail might have just gotten in the way of the main points.

Another good lesson is the writing strategy underlying this article about strategy -- which is to take a solution that works in one domain and apply it to another. In the article on writer's block in the winter issue of my newsletter Writing & Strategy, I talk about how you can create interesting topics just by taking a B2B solution and applying it to a B2C situation (or vice versa). The McKinsey case of applying production solutions to marketing is basically the same idea.

At the risk of coming off a bit geeky, I'll just finish by mentioning the subheads: Situation, Complication, Resolution, Implications. This is different from the tried-and-true: Problem-Solution-Result. I think I like McKinsey's version because it better reflects the reader's world where problems and solutions tend to be less clear cut. And "implications" opens the door to showing how the case might apply to the reader, rather than simply reporting the outcomes in the story. Often those outcomes might be sketchy, given that many organizations like to write cases as soon as possible after implementing a solution.