Left or right?
Peter, a Coca Cola salesman, returned home from his assignment in Israel very disappointed. He immediately went to see his boss.
“So Peter,” his boss asked, “why weren’t you successful with the Israelis?”
“When I got sent to Israel to increase our Coca Cola sales,” Peter replied, “I was confident that I would be able to succeed even though I couldn’t speak Hebrew.”
“So what did you do to get around the language problem?” his boss asked.
“I decided to convey our message to the Israelis via a poster campaign,” Peter replied, “and after a week of effort, I came up with the Israeli poster. Although there was no text on it, this poster was able to strongly put across our message using just three high- definition images. These images, when viewed sequentially, clearly told the Coca Cola story.”
“So what were these three images?” his boss asked.
“The left-hand picture — the first image,” Peter replied, “shows a man lying in the hot desert sand, totally exhausted and close to fainting. The middle picture — the second image, shows the man drinking Coca Cola. And the right-hand picture — the third image, shows the man totally refreshed and happy.”
“So what did you then do?” the boss asked.
“We printed tens of thousands of the posters,” Peter said, “and got them pasted up all over Israel.”
“That should have worked very well for us,” the boss said. “So what went wrong, Peter?”
“I didn’t realize,” Peter replied, “that Israelis read from right to left.” n
© david minkoff