Reviews and (Dis)Honesty

I bought a new car this summer, and before I had even signed the paperwork I was told that when the customer survey arrives I should try to give the seller "all 5s," and that if I couldn't, I should talk to him first to explain why. The ostensible reason to talk to the seller is so that he can improve on his performances in future, but my guess is that it is actually to guilt the buyer into giving the seller all 5s, either so she doesn't have to talk to the seller again, or because she is convinced that to not give him that score would be somehow unfair to him. I passively aggressively refused to complete the survey, despite at least semi-weekly requests to do so. I do feel a bit rude, but "if you can't say anything nice, say nothing at all," as they say.

In the world of internet book publishing, the customer review may be even more important than the silly auto survey I won't do. With the demise of both physical book stores and newspaper literary review columns, one must either magically come upon a book after an Amazon or Google search, or see some sort of online review of it in order to purchase and read it. The online review has become all pervasive--I can review not just my favorite (and least favorite) book, but my bank, bowling alley, and Brazilian restaurant with little effort. These items and places want me to review them, and they sometimes even give incentives for it.

Of course, no one is supposed to buy favorable reviews, because money makes people do things they might not otherwise, like lie, saying they had the best meal ever when it was actually lukewarm and bland. Of course, just because no one is supposed to doesn't mean no one does. A recent NYT article discusses just this subject: a man started a business in which he sold favorable book reviews, often multiple reviews for the same book, to fledgling authors who wanted to become noticed online in order for their books to sell. Some authors purchased the service saying they didn't need the reviews to be positive, but most expected to buy positive reviews. The author explains that
Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.

We know that advertising exists to sell us a product, and most of us can see the falsehoods in claims advertisements make. A review, on the other hand, is not created by a marketer and is not automatically positive, so we are doubly swayed when we see a positive review. A problem arises, though, when the reviews are not only falsely positive but also based upon nothing; Todd Rutherford appears to have fabricated reviews for clients of books he had not read, in essence scamming both the consumer and his client. Rutherford explains that “Objective consumers who purchase a book based on positive reviews will end up posting negative reviews if the work is not good,” but he apparently has no problem selling those objective consumers the bad book in the first place. We've all read a bad book, and few will go hungry over the cost of that book, but I think I might feel rather betrayed by a terrible book with overwhelmingly positive reviews. 

On Pecuniary Emulation, Product Placement, and Film

I've just seen the 2009 film The Joneses, about a marketing company that employs groups of people to act as families in order to sell everything they own, eat, and do to their well-off neighbors. The idea is nothing new, of course: I've just been re-reading The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, who in 1899 wrote that "the currently accepted legitimate end of effort becomes the achievement of a favourable comparison with other men; and therefore the repugnance to futility... coalesces with the incentive of emulation." I can almost imagine that the characters read Veblen as part of their training (which would have been nice to see in the film, perhaps).

The title of the film itself is, of course, a nod to the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses," and in some ways it does critique a society which seems to prize possessions above all else, and the costlier, the more prized. The movie does take a tragic turn as a direct result of this "pecuniary emulation" (to coin Veblen again), and certainly the satire does, at times, come through to the viewer. However, at least as much as The Joneses tried to satirize a love for things over human relationships, it also actually attempted to sell us the products supposedly being critiqued. At one point in the film, David Duchovny's "son" says "doesn't it bother you that we're lying to them?" and Duchovny replies with "I'm not lying, I LOVE this car!" The movie is ultimately little more than one big advertisement for Audi, Ethan Allen, HTC, and dozens of other products the "Joneses" are very happily consuming and selling. It seems to me that a satire would be better served by use of products that don't actually exist in real life, and that this movie is at least as insidious as its characters by pretending to make fun of what it is actually trying to sell to its viewers. I felt slight outrage (while secretly wanting an Audi for myself), and my only consolation in all of this is that the film made far less at the box office than it cost to produce.

On Branding and Counterfeit Goods

Today a friend came across a story about a fake Apple Store in China that was made to be a more or less exact replica of a real Chinese Apple Store, to such an extent that the bloggers and reporters discussing it weren't even sure whether or not it sold actual Apple products. It is even thought that the employees of the store believe that they are working for the actual Apple company. This article appeared on the heels of an announcement that Apple had a 125% increase in quarterly income compared to a year ago and shows no signs of slowing its pace.

I've written very little on counterfeit products because my opinion on them has not been cemented. On one hand, I believe that people should get what they think they're buying, and that counterfeit goods are almost always inferior in quality to their originals. People often buy name-brands because the quality and consistency of these products is ensured, just as people eat at chain restaurants or buy Starbucks, and counterfeiters often circumvent quality control by simply pasting the label of this brand on their sometimes lamentably inferior product. On the other hand, I'm often shocked by the extreme price mark-up that comes with a well-known brand, and almost feel that consumers are getting what they deserve if they are fooled by a counterfeit of that brand. Apple products, for instance, are aesthetically pleasing and generally work very well, but cost twice the price of their PC/smartphone/tablet counterparts for little discernible reason. I know I'm speaking blasphemy in the opinions of some of my readers, but the brand loyalty Apple has garnered is almost as insidious as the counterfeit rings that copy Apple's logos. The counterfeiter exploits the already brand-brainwashed public--is he a criminal, or an opportunist?

Kodak Moment(s)

This video advertises a product that allows the average housewife to easily manipulate family photos. I realize that photographic manipulation has occurred almost as long as photographs have existed, but does anyone else find this creepy? Family photos already tend to be extremely artificial, reducing a group of interesting, individual people to one static image, but isn't there something fun about the captured instant, however imperfect, that is lost once several photos are spliced into one? How long will it be before we airbrush our childrens' pimples out or even hire better-looking children to play them?

Forget "Born with It"

I've begun watching television for the first time in seven years, and while there is a motherlode of fakeness on TV about which to write, few shows or advertisements have announced to their own deception as loudly as Maybelline's "Falsies" mascara, which purports to make your real lashes look like false ones. Woman has moved, then, from wanting to look like "maybe she's born with it" to wishing to look like she's got fake facial alterations. Are we to celebrate the fake now, embracing artifice and shunning the genuine? Is anyone attracted to the woman on the left solely because her eyelashes are enormous-looking?