Editor’s Note: Please welcome the newest contributing author to the Walking the Path family, Sven Larsen. Larsen hails from Zemoga, a well-regarded interactive and digital marketing agency. Zemoga serves a range of clients in industries as diverse as healthcare, appliances and consumer packaged goods. Larsen will be writing about how health marketing communications professionals can use digital technologies and techniques to astound and educate.
Tell me if this sounds familiar: you spend a whole Saturday running errands in the bitter cold and want to stop somewhere for a warm cup o’ joe. A block or so away, you spot a forest green awning and wide windows and begin to weave your way through the crowd: venti caramel macchiato or grande java chip frappuccino? Imagine your surprise when you dash into what you thought was a Starbucks, only to be surrounded by shelves of the poshest paper in Manhattan.
There’s a lesson to be learned here – and no, it’s not that Kate’s Paperie should redesign its storefront – it’s that we have a tendency to interpret certain visual cues (i.e., color and shape) before textual ones (i.e., blatant sign). The book adaptation of John Berger’s influential television series Ways of Seeing opens with these lines: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.”
Somewhere between ten and twelve thousand years ago, prehistoric tribes started to lay the foundation for language in the form of petroglyphs, or images that were carved into rock. The images were often a repetitive series of human forms, with each figure representing a certain number of people. These petroglyphs not only represented early human census techniques, but they’re some of the very first examples of infographics.
An infographic is the visual representation of complex data or information. Infographics use data to tell a story and can be a powerful educational tool or sometimes, a call to action. There are several advantages to using visual data to communicate:
- It can introduce complex information in a way that does not overwhelm the reader.
- It can present old or known information in a new perspective.
- It can point to recurring errors in an elaborate system.
- It can identify patterns and trends, as well as make predictions.
- It can use statistical, numerical, or factual data to tell a story.
- It can transcend cultural barriers by using a visual language.
Two important themes are emerging with regards to the pharmaceutical industry and its marketing practices: transparency and storytelling.
Patients and physicians are now, more than ever, united in the goal of making informed decisions about treatment. Patients need access to information that is easy to understand, while busy doctors need to minimize the time spent digesting large amounts of data. Meanwhile, the FDA constantly monitors pharmaceutical companies to enforce legislation requiring full and public disclosure of all drug-related information. By delivering data in a fast and compact manner, Big Pharma can become an important ally to the entire healthcare industry.
In addition, marketing executives and media professionals are constantly challenging drug industries to learn how to humanize their brand: and they can start with storytelling (see number 5, above). But when your story is based on facts and figures, how can you engage your audience? Take a look at the following infographic by Raj Kamalaich (http://www.rajkamalaich.com) about the latest epidemic du jour, Swine Flu (click to enlarge).
What did you learn at a single glance? Spending just a handful of minutes looking at this infographic, you’ll be an expert on the history of H1N1, how the virus spreads, how it affects the body, and how it can be treated. Now take a look at the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza) on the same topic – which would you rather read?
Despite their ancient roots, infographics play an integral role in our modern world of hyperstimuli and short attention spans. When you’re standing at a newsstand or browsing through RSS feeds, what grabs your attention the most, the graphics or the text?
Truly, a well-designed infographic is worth 1,000 words.
Read More from Walking the Path:
Hi Sven,
While I think that infographics can be incredibly useful, and visualize data in ways that really impact the reader, I am not sure if your “Piggy Trouble” example is a great one. There is so much going on here, and so much copy, that it’s hard to really get a handle on all of the data.
I think this one from the New York Times is more effective at communicating meaning from data:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/09/08/us/cost-scatterplot.html