Skip to content

Marketing Thought

Clarifying management/marketing theory

Menu
  • Neil Bendle
  • Popular Marketing Metrics: How Not To Mess Them Up
  • Marketing Metrics 4th Edition Book
  • Marketing PhD Applications
  • Advice For The Marketing Academic Job Market
  • Marketing Strategy
  • Public Policy, Behavioral Economics and Marketing
Menu

The Secret Axis: Label Your Axis So As Not To Lie

Posted on October 14, 2016September 29, 2021 by neilbendle

Gary Smith’s advice on statistics, Standard Deviations, is a really useful and entertaining book. In this Smith points out a number of major problems with the way stats are used. Some problems arise from deliberate tricks played by researchers/managers describing data. Other problems arise through carelessness; the researcher/manager using the data doesn’t realize they are abusing the data. Over the next few weeks I’ll examine three problems that Smith highlights. Today I’ll focus on The Secret Axis.

The Secret Axis

One of the problems Smith describes comes from the way that data is visualized. He makes a host of scathing and funny comments about data presentation. I liked his description of “The Secret Axis” (Smith, 2014, page 73) which is something I often see in graphs. (Technically something I don’t see given it is a missing axis).

Smith gives high profile examples of abuse of data visualization. In 1982 Ronald Reagan presented his budget plan with no numbers on the Y-axis. The viewer, therefore, could not know the scale of what was being presented. In the end the president’s team choose to present a 9% difference in tax plans as a 90% difference on the (unspecified) Y-axis. The quote from David Gergen, Reagan’s spokesman is fantastic.

Trending
Audio Mining And Marketing: Great Potential

‘”We tried it with numbers and found they were very hard to read on television so we took them off”‘

Smith, 2014, page 74.

If we are (very, very) generous we might assume that Gergen made a mistake that just happened to make his boss look better. If we are less generous we might call it deliberate deception. Making your graph meaningless doesn’t help people interpret it.

How To Lie With The Secret Axis. The Data Is The Same In These Graphs. The second Just Shrinks the Range Of The Y-Axis And Hides It
How To Lie With The Secret Axis. The Data Is The Same In These Graphs. The Second Just Shrinks the Range Of The Y-Axis And Hides It

Be Careful About How You Present Data

The lesson is that we all need to be careful about the way we present data. We don’t want to leave anyone with a false impression because of our secret axis.

Conversely when confronted with a secret axis don’t accept it. What is a graph without a clear axis? Such a graph is merely a pretty picture and should never be treated seriously.

For more on data visualization see here, here and here.

Read: Gary Smith, 2014, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics, The Overlook Press.

Share on Social Media
twitter facebook linkedin reddit

  • Internal Measurement Of Brand Value
  • Regulation And Business Responsibility
  • Leadership, Power, And Morality
  • Gaining And Using Power

MASB’s Common Language Dictionary

Need a marketing definition? Use MASB’s Common Language Marketing Dictionary. Click for the MASB Common Language Marketing Dictionary

Pages in Marketing Thought

  • A Plea About Language Used In Marketing
  • Advice For The Marketing Academic Job Market
  • Behavioral Econ For Kids: The Cartoon Book
  • Data Visualization Advice
  • Machine Learning (ML) And Marketing: What Should You Know?
  • Marketing In The Movies
  • Marketing Metrics 4th Edition Book
    • Chapter of Marketing Metrics 4th Edition, Free Sample
  • Marketing PhD Applications
  • Marketing Strategy
    • Measuring Culture Is A Challenge, But Don’t Be Silly
    • Rationality And Marketing Strategy
    • Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning
    • Strategy And Evolutionary Thinking
  • Neil Bendle
  • Popular Marketing Metrics: How Not To Mess Them Up
    • Brand Valuation: Progress But Lots More Needed
    • Customer Equity: Nice Idea, Bit Of A Mess In Execution
    • How To Use, And Misuse, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
    • Is ROI The Most Abused Term In Marketing?
    • Market Share: Always An Indicator Never A Target
    • Marketing Accounts: A Better Way To Measure Marketing Performance
    • Measuring Competition With The Bendle Panda Index
    • Net Promoter Score: Sadly Not As Magical As Supporters Suggest
    • Profit Measurement: Choose Your Own Level Is Problematic
    • Tobin’s Q: Why Academics Should Listen To Managers
    • Total Q, A New Improved Tobin’s Q? Not By Much
    • Value Of A Like: Do Not Use For Budgeting
  • Public Policy, Behavioral Economics and Marketing
  • Recommended Books
©2022 Marketing Thought | Built using WordPress and Responsive Blogily theme by Superb
Go to mobile version