Is it worth to study marketing?

What's your favorite, most thorough Marketing case study?

• I've been reading a lot about online marketing recently. I'm disappointed by the low quality of "case studies" I've found online and in books. A typical example is this http://www.imagescape.com/clients-like-you/contact-form/. It's about how to increase conversions on a Contact Us page by shortening the form from 11 fields to 4 fields. But they changed so many other variables. They changed their headline from “Contact Center” to “Quick Contact”, 2 CTAs vs 1 CTA (“Call our phone number” is the second CTA), and changed the overall length of page. This is consistent with the quality I've been seeing online, and unfortunately even books. These are warm bedtime stories for marketers, not thorough case studies. What are your favorite, most thorough marketing case studies? Preferably about digital / online marketing :)

• Answer:

  My favorite marketing case study is about Uber, written primarily by Morgan Brown http://www.growthhackers.com/companies/uber/ .  I think the reason most marketing case studies aren't very good is that there is no real benefit for companies to write about their own marketing efforts and results.  Companies don't want to share this information with their competitors.  However, it's nearly impossible to market in private, so it is possible to reverse engineer how a company is growing.   Particularly if you can survey existing customers to find out how they discovered the product.  Of course this approach won't tell you the exact results of every effort, but it is more likely to be as transparent as possible.  Morgan Brown took this approach with his Uber case study and had input from several other marketers (including me).