Last week I shared this photo with a number of people and it got a lot of laughs.
As I thought about it more over the weekend, there is a rethink message in here as well, some better than others.
The fact is, we get bombarded with images and messages these days and more often than not images come with messages telling us how to interpret them. Even though it’s really obvious in some cases what the messages should be (like with the above, we know it’s for a hand dryer), because there is no text under this hand dryer, someone added their own commentary that, out of context, actually makes a lot of sense.
I tend to steer clear of politics on this site, but it’s a glaring illustration of this point. People losing jobs, houses, and healthcare are the statistics we are shown, and different groups offer their own explanation of these fact-based images and often the explanations have nothing in common.
Corporations do the same thing. When news is better, or worse, than expeced, corporations often offer a “narrative” or “talk track” to share with reporters, shareholders, and Wall Street to help explain the “images” or facts of their financial results. Some corporations even go so far as to manipulate their financial results in hopes that the numbers alone will tell a particular story that is in line with how the corporation wants to be perceived.
So be skeptical of both the images, the numbers, and the words that go along with them. Just because they seem to make sense, it’s worth taking a second look to see if the description has little or nothing to do with what the image, or the numbers, really mean.
My next blog will be back in the more conventional vein of this site – where I recently tried to change a flight online, it didn’t work so I sent them an e-mail and their response was to expect it to take up to a week for them to get back to me. The flight I am trying to change is in two days . . . Alaska Airlines needs to do some rethinking in their customer support arena.
-Ric
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