Lessons from marketing cases.

The marketing-case season has started. The Nationale Marketing Strijd is coming up, and so are the business courses. You get a company, a problem, a few hours and a room full of people who are going to judge what you come up with. Here are a few things that help.

Do your homework.

Know the company before you start solving its problems. What is happening inside it? What does its advertising look like? What is its strategy? What are its competitors doing?

Watch creative films, commercials and viral videos too. Read trendwatching.com. Give yourself something to draw on. You are bound to find an idea worth stealing.

Get organised. Then get on with it.

Make a plan and stick to it. Read the material together, agree on the basics and divide the work. Give each team a specific job, but compare findings regularly. Otherwise you end up with four separate answers and spend the last twenty minutes pretending they are one.

Find the connecting thread.

Everything should belong to the same idea. Find an overarching concept and make sure the other parts of your solution lead back to it. Or at least pretend they do.

Then add something that makes people sit up. One creative element that makes very little sense, but is so good you want to keep it anyway. The connecting thread makes you look considered. The unexpected bit makes you memorable.

And always include a line for “miscellaneous” in the budget. Everything you cannot justify, or simply forgot, goes there. :)

Give them something worth watching.

Structure · 45 to 60 minutesPresentation gallery walk.Makes a presentation interactive without asking a traditional organisation to…Not the same slides AGAIN. A mood board, a little play, a dance if you must. Try something different. Other teams are presenting too. Give the jury a reason to remember yours.

Build the story carefully:

• The teaser. A question, a quote, an anecdote. Get their attention.
• The money. What will it cost? More importantly, what will it bring them?
• The concept. What is the big idea?
• The creative. What does that idea actually look like?

A few things not to do.

Do not casually sell off a business unit. Companies do not make that decision in an hour, and neither should you. Especially if the person running that unit is on the jury. At most, you “shift the focus”.

And please, not another online personal money coach or personalised debit card. Been there, done that.

Looking back in 2026.

Some of this is very obviously 2006. The viral videos. The personalised debit cards. The confidence that a good presentation and a “miscellaneous” line would sort everything out. Today I would leave out the unexplained creative idea and the unexplained costs. If something does not fit, work out why. If you do not know what it costs, say so.

But under the student bravado there is something I would keep: a case competition is not just an exercise in finding the right answer. It is an exercise in getting a particular group of people to want that answer.

Play the person, not the game.

Reflection · 4 min readOne-nil up before the conversation.Most people prepare what they want to say.Who is in the room? What do they want to see? What are they proud of? What would make them nervous? What would they be excited to take back to their colleagues?

The written brief tells you the problem. It does not tell you everything about the people judging your solution. A perfectly reasonable proposal can land badly because it dismisses something they spent years building. Another can land well because it gives words and shape to something they have wanted to do for ages.

That is not a reason to flatter the jury or tell them what they want to hear. It is a reason to pay attention. You are presenting to people, not to a scoring sheet.

Good strategy rarely wins it. Bad strategy can lose it.

In a case competition, a sound strategy usually gets you into contention. It gives the jury enough confidence to take the idea seriously. But it is rarely the thing they fall in love with.

They fall in love with an idea. Something they can picture. Something they want to tell someone else about. Something that makes them think: we could actually do this.

Bad strategy gives them a reason to say no. Good strategy takes that reason away. Then the idea still has to make them care.

I would be careful about turning that into a rule for all strategy work. Winning a jury over and making a company better are not the same thing.

The idea needs a life after the presentation.

This is where my thinking has moved most since 2006. Back then, the finish line was the presentation. Now the question I care about is what happens afterwards.

What would the company actually do differently? Who would have to make it happen? What would a customer notice? A room falling in love with an idea is a good start. It is not proof that the idea works.

That is the connection to Acts, not ads. An idea becomes interesting when it changes what you do, not just what you say.

So yes: understand the room, get the strategy right and give people an idea they can fall in love with. Then give that idea something real to do.

Written in 2006. Original: Case wijsheden, 16 January 2006. Edited in English, with a reflection added, in October 2026.