Lesson 2/Week 3: Using Market Research to Gain Consumer Insights

We watched a fascinating YouTube video for a Hans Rosling TEDTalk this week.  I don’t know how Dr. Rosling was able to animate his analysis on the slides he had in the video, but the insight is so much more powerful watching motion convey the differences over time.  Time series data graphed as multiple lines on a chart are very helpful, but watching motion is so intuitive for seeing the magnitude and speed with which values are changing.  I remember my first Kelley Connect week, where some tools for data visualization were presented that blew my mind.  I had never really seen a bubble chart before, where 3 variables can be represented in 2D space by having the bubble size correspond to a third variable.  Another example occurred this week as we were presented a collage of our wiki responses from the first week of the definition of marketing.  More common ideas showed up in the collage as larger words to convey their relative frequency.  These ideas are causing me to be less and less patient with the traditional way of presenting data, where teams believe that an overwhelming number of line and bar charts in a PowerPoint deck will get the point across.  I think the goal is for anyone in your target audience to be able to instantly grasp the information that’s conveyed visually. 

The overall insight Dr. Rosling found was that the ‘we’ and ‘them’ characterization of the world is rapidly changing.  It’s not just developed vs. Third World anymore.  Even developing countries are seeing families shrink and live longer, looking more and more like developed countries.  Family planning was cited as a key driver.  Dr. Rosling points out that we need to look at the data rather than just make assumptions that lead to myths.  He also pointed out that even regional perceptions can be wrong, because there are huge differences among the data within Arab states, Africa, Eastern Europe, or Asia.  For instance, he discussed the strong correlation between GDP/Capita and Child survival percentage, but within a given region there are huge differences depending usually upon governmental attitudes towards trade, etc.  We just need to be cautious of the averages we use and the context in which we use them.

What’s amazing is that he was using publicly funded data and advocating strongly that we improve the ability to search these free databases.  A lot of insights can come from it.  It certainly shattered my impression of the Third World being a place where life expectancy dramatically trailed the West because of income disparities.  Dr. Rosling may not have been using these data for market research for a product, but the big takeaway was seeing how real data will provide the insights to make good, informed decisions.