How infographics can enhance business

Abstract

Since the beginning of mankind, writing has been part of the evolution of humanity. Writing is the graphic representation of a language, through signs engraved or drawn on a flat support. Nowadays, in spite of our progress in writing, it is still incomplete and evolving but when an image graph summarized the writing of a simple idea (symbol or sign) it is considered more assertive and has the advantage of being understood by all, regardless of language. That is why the combination of writing and image always make a successful way to explain: this is called Infographic. The graphical information is made up of visual elements such as charts and maps, and help understand the meaning of a text. The visual representation of information is not only a way to show what has been discovered. Instead, the potential to become the process by which we understand not only the content but also adding new knowledge and new meanings to the same content. As the volume of available data continues to grow, business insights derived from data are becoming a vital part of corporate success. In 2017, 53% of companies reported that they adopt big data in decision making. Besides that, the ability to deal with data is required for managers, frontline employees, and everybody in between. However, nothing has fundamentally changed in how human brain process information. Firstly, people think visually. The fact of the matter is that the first written languages occurred only five thousand years ago, and most of them were pictorial. Even nowadays almost a half of the human brain is dealing with visual processing, and images are perceived significantly faster than letters. Research shows that the use of visuals on the internet has increased about 100 times in the last 10 years, and the content with compelling images attract up to 94% more views than the same articles without visuals. This thesis aims to understand how this new form of communication has impact in business and their way to do marketing. It has followed a path that has been divided into three parts: In the first part is explained the concept of communication inside the organization and how this has evolved during the years until nowadays. Secondly the thesis reviewed the history and the development of infographics. Afterwards a definition of infographics was given to clarify the subject to be discussed. Then I argued the reasons why the human brain craves for visuals and proposed that infographics is an effective way to present a large amount of information, data and knowledge. In the end of the paper I examined how the popularity of infographics brought both challenges and opportunities for organizations both in internal and external communication analyzing two important marking concept that use infographics: content marketing and visual storytelling.