Paul Scott is Senior Partner in a company called Front Elevation that he established offering ‘marketing to companies that don’t do marketing’. He considers the case study a major weapon in the SME marketing arsenal. Here he offers some advice on how best to deploy it in the digital age.
When putting your case studies together, it is important to remember the old saying: Life is a journey, not a destination.
The humble case study has moved on, not least because of the digital age.
Natural Stone is no longer the monolith that people associate with traditional buildings, but it is sometimes an uphill battle to persuade architects how far the product has come in meeting the aspirational demands of the 21st century.
It is important that the industry helps itself in addressing this issue, and while stone has received mainstream success in recent years in competitions such as the Stirling Prize and the recognition has been fantastic for the profile of natural stone as a modern construction material, there remains much work to do to reinforce the message.
As part of the case study research that my company, Front Elevation, carries out for its clients, we sit down with architects once a project is completed and talk to them about it. This gives us feedback on how the project went – what they think went well and not so well.
With our industry experience in specification sales, we like to think we understand architects’ requirements and go to great lengths to include their input in the case studies we produce for clients.
What they tell us is that everyone photographs the destination but not the journey.
I receive 20-or-so construction industry publications every month and see fantastic images of shiny new buildings.
Front Elevation takes such pictures for its clients. Indeed, some of our clients call us in when it is a fait accompli – the building is finished.
But what specifiers tell me they really want to see is the nitty-gritty that answers questions about the construction. Is it thick block stone or stone cladding? How is it fixed? How has the insulation been installed? How has cold bridging been addressed?
What an architect is looking for from a case study is simple answers, preferably with pictures to illustrate them.
A series of good, high resolution photographs, especially on websites, can answer all – or at least most – of these questions. We throw loads of images at a website but include very few details. Why?
With a good quality digital camera we can bring the project to the architect. While mobile phones and tablets have come on in leaps and bounds and can be great as cameras to record issues on jobs that might need to be claimed for, they do have their limits, and picture quality, especially resolution, can be one of them.
A good quality hi-res image, even uploaded to Facebook, can be zoomed into so the specifier or potential client can have a digital rummage around to look at fixings and other details.
If we are to project natural stone as a highly engineered product, let’s show it off as such.
One of the principal reasons for using stone, especially these days when it is often a decorative finish rather than a structural element, is its appearance. Usually the point of using stone is for the solidity and permanence it adds to a project, even though it might be used as a relatively lightweight cladding.
Natural stone flooring is another great example, with all manner of building services and data cabling routed beneath the surface. But all anyone sees from the finished image is a nice shiny, completely level (hopefully) stone finish.
We are only too aware of how coy the construction industry is about telling people how good it is, but let’s get these fantastic solutions photographed and show how our ingenuity has overcome what can seem to be insurmountable problems when the team sits around the site meeting room table discussing them.
Natural stone is a fantastic medium and with the incredible processing machinery available today backed up by traditional skills handed down through generations, we have the ability to use it to spectacular advantage. Be proud to show how that is achieved.
So next time you embark on a project that you intend to use as a case study, think about telling the whole story about the journey and leave the ‘Are we there yet?’ concerns far behind.