So we have been talking a lot about the Promotion Strategy these past few weeks in 296 Class. It reminds me of the movie “The Joneses” that I watched on the airplane on the way back home this summer.
So The Joneses is a movie about this family moving to the new neighborhood. They were portraited as a model family that everyone admires. Whatever these members use are all new products that everyone wishes to have. For example, the husband would have a collection of golf sticks and keeps on playing golf with other neighbors. The wife would show off her kitchen and hair products to all the housewives around. The daughter would fashionably show up in class with all the make-up kits and get surrounded by other jealous girls. The son would automatically become a hawt guy since he owns a flashy convertible car.
In the end of the movie, we realize that it’s not all that! They are actually agents pretending to be a perfect family so they could be a good “reference group” for the neighborhood. Every week, they has a meeting that shows a report on how much they’ve sold those products to their friends and peers. This is exactly called Personal Selling as what we’ve learned about.
This is an extreme case of marketing, but who knows if it’s gonna happen 10 years from now? Watch out for perfection, cuz you might fall for those reference group’s traps!
