The Hero's Journey - A Case Study
Plus Member News and some exciting events upcoming...
In my day job I’m a copywriter.
Before that, I spent over 20 years as a Cisco-certified IT Consultant, installing networks and communications systems all over the world.
When I left that world and retrained to write marketing copy, my background meant IT networking and communications companies were an obvious target market for my services. Not only do I already understand the technology (which means I need very little briefing to get up to speed on my clients’ products or services), I also understand my clients’ customers - because I used to be one. I understand their challenges, because I used to face the same ones.
In deciding what type of copy I would write for this market, I looked at the Buyer’s Journey. This is the process any consumer goes through leading up to a purchase, from being aware of a need for something, to considering their options, through to choosing a product.
In my experience as an IT Consultant, a major factor in choosing a solution to our problems was a deep distrust of salespeople. Engineers and technology experts are especially notorious for this, preferring to listen to what their peers in the industry say.
Which means a case study is one of the most important sales documents for an IT vendor. A case study is sometimes called a success story or customer story, because it tells the story of how a customer solved a problem in their business by using a particular product or service.
When a potential, but sales-wary, technology customer reads a case study of someone similar to them, the result is an increase in trust in that product, service, or vendor.
I chose to specialise in writing case studies as they, more than any other type of marketing material, leverage my experience the most, and so offer the greatest benefit to my clients.
What I didn’t realise at first was that the writing of case studies would prove to have so much in common with what we do in Caversham Writers.
You see, there’s a structure to writing a case study. It follows a narrative in much the same way a story works in novels and films.
Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949. It famously influenced George Lucas, who used the mythology-based Hero’s Journey laid out in Campbell’s work as a map for Luke Skywalker’s story in Star Wars.
The Hero’s Journey is also the journey a customer goes through in a case study. The stages of the journey map remarkably.
Sprinkled through my story above of a career change from working in IT to writing for IT are several words that form the basis of a case study story. Here’s how they map to the Hero’s Journey.
Background
A case study starts with this, telling us who the customer is and what their business is all about. In the Hero’s Journey our hero begins in a situation of normality. Luke Skywalker’s background is on Tatooine. He’s a farm boy living an ordinary life.
Challenge
The case study customer finds they have a problem to solve. Something gets broken, or an issue arises that cannot be fixed internally. In the Hero’s Journey there’s an inciting incident that changes ordinary life. In Star Wars, R2D2 arrives with a message and Luke’s aunt and uncle are killed. He has a challenge to face.
Journey
Our case study customer looks for many ways to solve the challenge, involving research, testing, evaluations, and consultations. They gather information and resources to help. In the Hero’s Journey, the call to action is answered and our hero starts to undergo change, gathering knowledge and allies. Luke Skywalker trains with Obi Wan Kenobi, meets Han and Leia, and finds out about the Death Star.
Solution
Our case study customer finds our clients’ product or service and implements it. The Hero’s Journey reaches a climax with a final battle where all is won. Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star.
Results and Benefits
Problem solved, the case study will report on how things have improved for the customer, using metrics and numbers to specify the result, and describing how those numbers are of benefit to the customer. The Hero’s Journey ends with a return to what is now a new normal - a life changed by events. The knowledge gained is shared to the benefit of all. Luke Skywalker joins the rebels and is rewarded in the final ceremony.
One lesson I learnt early as a case study writer was in remembering who to cast in what role. My client is the one who pays me so it’s tempting to cast them as the hero of the story. But they’re not. Their customer is the hero - that’s one reason they are persuaded to take part in the case study in the first place.
My client is the mentor, the wise counsel, the wizard. They are Merlin, Gandalf, Dumbledore, Mufasa. They are Morpheus from The Matrix or Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid. They are Obi Wan Kenobi.
Member News
Some absolutely splendid news from Emily Goode, who was invited to attend a Royal Garden Party at Buckingham Palace. From her LinkedIn post:
“A wonderful, and slightly surreal, honour to represent Progress Theatre and all the work we do in our community, surrounded by people who also work tirelessly to support charities and communities throughout the UK.
What a memorable day. An experience that will stay with me my whole life.”
RAG Parade - Sunday 17 May | 12:00 to 17:00
More news on Dreading Slam’s involvement in the Reading Students’ Union’s RAG Parade this weekend. As part of the university’s centenary celebrations, the parade starts at 12:00 outside Broad Street Mall, moves down Broad Street, across Market Place and into Forbury Gardens.
From the university website: “In Forbury Gardens, the celebrations continue with an afternoon of live entertainment, interactive stalls and delicious food. We have invited incredible local talent to perform at the Festival across three live stages, featuring vibrant music, dance and spoken word.”
Gill Passman has sent me this.
I will be the compère for our act which will celebrate the amazing talent of the Dreading Slam poets as well as promoting our monthly Slam on the first Sunday of the month at The Rising Sun Arts Centre.
I had just over two weeks to put the whole thing together but, as always, our amazing Slammers have stepped up to the mark and volunteered their time to take part in this event.
The act will include a “mock” taster Slam, our ever popular quickfire round which will be up to 5 lines on the theme of Century or whatever twist our poets decide to put on it….and believe me when I say that they are very creative and oft hilarious…we are also very excited to have our 3 times champion, Sarah Smith (Wordsmith) joining us after too long a break…
So, if anyone is in town on Sunday, please come and see us on the Meadow Stage at 3pm in Forbury Gardens and enjoy listening to some of the best performance poets in town…
Fourbears Books Events
Alex from Fourbears has told me about a couple of great looking events coming up at the shop.
Women’s Prize for Fiction Party
Thursday 11th June 19:30 – 20:30
6 shortlisted books, 6 wonderful ladies presenting each book on the shortlist. Join us for an evening celebrating the Women’s Prize for Fiction which is the greatest celebration of female creativity in the world.
One of the advocates championing a book on the night will be Carolyn McGlone, the agent we met recently at a Caversham Writers event (the audio of our Q & A is in a recent post: What Literary Agents Are Really Looking For.
LAUNCH PARTY - Bad Influence by Will Carver
Tuesday 23rd June 19:00 – 20:00
Will Carver is back, and celebrating his brand new book, Bad Influence. Come and celebrate with Will and the Fourbears team.
I’ve already signed up - see you there!
Our Last Meeting
Write Night: Your Work in Progress
I never record our Zoom meetings, unless it is an author event and our guest has agreed to the recording, which I publish in this newsletter for those unable to attend on the night.
I do usually have the Zoom AI Companion enabled, though, which sometimes gets remarked on by attendees. It’s a valid concern, given the widespread misuse of AI and the resulting lack of trust in it.
For us writers, the main issue involves copyright infringement - the unauthorised use of an author’s work to train the LLM (large language model) to mimic human writers’ styles. The means by which Anthropic et al do this involves an automated mass extraction of works, mostly from websites hosting pirated copies of books. They also engage in scraping and crawling of existing online content across the entire web.
In my opinion, the Zoom AI Companion is an unlikely scraper of material as described above. Our conversations would be an inefficient input source for anything other than improving speech-to-text transcription capability.
Rather than providing input, the AI component in this case is giving me an output - a summary of the meeting. I use it as an aide memoire - something to jog my memory of what came up in our event, in case I want to write about it in more detail here.
If you’re curious, here’s the output from this week’s event:
This was a writing group session where members shared updates on their progress during a dedicated writing hour. Lisa reported making significant progress on her memoir about becoming a landlord after her husband’s death, which has evolved into a book guide for first-time landlords. Amy discussed regaining her writing flow and nearing the end of her play, while Richard shared that he wrote two Japan-inspired poems about Hiroshima and Zen Gardens. Moira worked on showing rather than telling in her Shakespearean adaptation, and Daniel, a first-time participant, shared his early progress on a project about traditional philosophy while discussing his approach to making it more accessible rather than academic. The group also discussed challenges around world-building in science fiction and the importance of considering what readers know versus what writers know.
I wouldn’t rely on it for detail - I’m not sure that represents Moira’s contribution accurately, although the rest is pretty much as I remember it. If you attended this week - what do you think?
Next Week's Meeting
Prompt-Write Night (In Person Event!)
Wednesday, May 20th · 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM BST
Feeling stuck? Unblock yourself in this writing session where we set a prompt or theme for members to use as a jumping off point for an hour of writing. You can use it to write fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose.
Free To Join, Free To Attend
As you know Caversham Writers is free to join and free to attend and I want it to remain so. That doesn’t mean it is free to run, though. I organise the group meetings on Meetup.com who have seen fit to double the fees paid by group organisers over the last year.
This has led to many groups shutting down or moving platform. I like to think of Caversham Writers as a local group with a global reach and I want us to remain open to voices from all over the world. Meetup provides that global reach so I intend to stay there, but would welcome any contributions toward the costs of running the group.
So if you enjoy this free newsletter and our weekly free events, please consider helping out by buying me a coffee at the link below.