I ran into this little post over at Medallia Blog a few months back and wanted to share the idea with you. A large pharmacy company wanted to tap into the market for aspirin in the middle east. The problem was that many of the people are illiterate so using words is out if they want to go for the maximum amount of people being able to understand the ad.

What they did was place this on many billboards…

After running the campaign for a few weeks, the advertising had no effect whatsoever. After a bit of market research, (Also known as asking people!) the problem dawned on them. Arabic is read from right to left, so the pictures were being read in the wrong order making it look like the medicine actually causes the discomfort.