Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
Hans Rosling’s Moving Bubbles
Monday I posted a link to Hans Rosling’s video on the News/Death ratio. Hans Rosling founded the Gapminder foundation in 2005. According to the foundation’s website his mission was to “To promote sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels”. He developed a software package called Trendalyzer that helped bring these important statistics to life. Trendalyzer creates a scatter plot of bubbles that evolves over time. This simple intuitive application allows for the simultaneous display of 5 dimensions : 2 axes, the size of the bubbles, the color of the bubbles and the change over time. You can view many examples on the gapminder site.
Hans Rosling did this famous presentation at the 2006 TED conference where he presented some of the graphs with the excitement and energy of a broadcaster during the Kentucky Derby. I think it is one of the best examples of how data can be brought to life through smart visualization.
In March 2006 Google bought Trendalyzer. They made it available through their visualization API. Our analytics team has used it a number of times. Here is an example I used in a presentation at the nGenera conference in Toronto yesterday. It demonstrates how we used it for a retailer to demonstrate the seasonality of different product categories during the Holiday season. Every bubble is a product category. The vertical axis shows the share of total revenue a category accounts for during a particular week. The horizontal axis shows a category’s revenue growth during that week compared the rest of the year. Categories move to the right during weeks they become very popular. They move up if they account for a higher proportion of the revenue during that week. The color of the bubbles shows the number of units sold during a week (this shows the difference between high and low ticket price categories).
You can see that the first couple of weeks most of the product categories only move slightly back and forth (the effect of weekday vs weekend). Then when we approach Thanksgiving around the end of November the cloud of bubbles suddenly spreads out. The products that moved to the right all were related to the Thanksgiving festivities. This clearly demonstrated the need for carefully tailoring the communications around the products that were relevant during each particular week, particularly around major holidays (a similar trend was observed during the Christmas period).
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da best. Keep it going! Thank you