About ten years ago I collaborated with Mark Peck (currently president/CEO of ApexxGroup, LLC) on visual representation of customer buying behavior analysis. At the time we thought we were pretty clever since we were able to make effective use of bubble charts to compare changes in customer retention, defection and overall value at a decile-by-decile basis. Our clients loved the work since it reduced large tables of mind-numbing numbers to simple graphics that focused attention on the critical patterns. On limitation of our charts is that they only compared two years of data so it was difficult to show changes over longer periods of time.
Today Mark shared this TED video. It’s a few years old but the interactive nature of these relatively standard bubble charts makes for a powerful presentation. Rosling used software created by his affiliate gapminder.org. Though we didn’t have that ten years ago, it now occurs to me that we could have simply used a PowerPoint slide presentation to accomplish a similar effect.
In addition to the great graphics, Rosling is both entertaining and thought provoking. Your thoughts?
Source: TED: Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen, Feb, 2006
