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Recommendations

What is it with someone recommending another someone or sometimes themselves to a certain role or job or relationship?  They start describing the many virtues and the advancements and the accomplishments from the past.  Although past results are no guarantee of future outcomes.

We see it in our daily lives - from a good doctor to a skilled plumber to a vesatile restaurant to a good toothbrush.  There are whole businesses that thrive on someone else's ability to recommend something to somebody else.

Of course what I find fascinating is not so much that we are inherently a species that likes this social interaction but that we feel compelled to expand on the recommended item or individual beyond what is necessary.

If I want a landscaping professional I do not want to ask my friend his opinion only to hear - talk to Renaldo - he is really good.  Why is mere talk to Jose not enough?  Is it because there is some lingering doubt in my friend's mind that he sent me a wacko last time I asked for a plumber?  Or is it because my friend wants to appear knowledgable when it comes to selecting the right tradesman?  Is his empahsis on good going to swing the vote to a point where he is going to benefit financially?  Or is it just the nobility of his human heart that he does not want me to be buried (become part of the landscape) by the wrong choice.

It is an amalgamation of a few things I suspect after researching this topic during my spare time.  Mostly tilted in favor of some self satisfaction derived as a result of being a know all. 

Marketing or more specifically advertising is an entire subject and industry built on this foundation.  The English language itself from romance writers to those in the employ of car and drug companies would not exist if it were not for the use of Adjectives.  Specifically when it comes to describing pointless characteristics of an item or being.

Superlatives are the excessive ointments applied to make something that may or may not be stellar standout.  To keep saying 'Intelligent' in every tag line should not be the criteria that drives you to buy a transport appliance as an example.

Another trick used by commodity peddlers is to use some other third party ratings or results or such as a guarantor in stead.  Moody's to JD Power to thousands of other hoots come out sounding like the expert in a field at the same time being politically correct about what is and what is not the real thing.

It is not a story of good, bad and the ugly.  Its always a soup of adjectives that would leave a commoner dazed.

So now that I have pontificated on this important piece of daily yet not so readily evident observations, I feel compelled to recommend my keenly astute writings to the Pulitzer committee.
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Comments

  1. RajendraSeptember 15, 2013 at 11:52 PM

    and I will second your nomination. Mr. Pulitzer, are you there?

    ReplyDelete

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