Aspirational purchases
Dec. 15th, 2012 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseFinally, since today seems like a good point in my weekend to delve into the issue of flawed social situations, now seems a good time to hammer this one out.
The main thrust of sales is always to sell to what the customer believes purchasing a certain product or service says about them. You can get into the technical details and the literal truth of what the product can do for them later in the negotiation. Essentially, the message is always that owning product X tells the world that you have quality Y. It communicates, at a glance, that you are a certain type of person, or at least aspire to be. Your brand of watch or choice of cufflinks over knots conveys something about you, and that image is, usually, what you want people to think about you. Though plenty of times that tends to get lost in translation because your signifiers aren’t necessarily shared . E.g. If you drive around revving your Aston Martin DB9 you probably expect that it conveys that you are exciting, daring and monied, and it probably does convey the latter across the board, on top of telegraphing that you don’t know how to change gears.
Thus the crux of the matter. He wants to be perceived in a certain way and I’m, apparently, an accessory to that aspiration. By behaving in a certain manner generally I’m conveying that I’m easy to get along with, on top of a layer of being known to get the job done, by bringing the right people together and/or applying the correct logic to fix things. I’m also, as a result of this, rather good at making the person I’m with look good. Things as basic as having a good memory for details and prompting him to tell a funny anecdote or adding a throw away humorous line to something he’s saying all make him look more witty than he may or may not actually be. Certainly, the close proximity quite likely makes him look desirable, and in the crudest of sales fashions, generates interest, at least in what’s going on, as a starting point. So fine, I’ll help him present that façade to the public, though I’m keenly aware that there seems to be a very real underlying issue as to why he’s trying to present that particular image. In the long-term, it’s not going to help him and will simply reinforce the internalising he’s done about this issue. But there’s nothing I can do to change that, and I’m not sure, after everything I’ve been put through, that I would even bother to try if I could. If he wants to carry on this farce I’ll help, in so far as it’s useful for me to do so, but I’ll be plotting my own course as a focus. If it takes my assisting him to get what I want out of him then bring it on. I should long ago have stopped being surprised as people’s lack of self-awareness and refusal to face self-analysis.
Thinking about it in those terms, perhaps my adaptability isn’t so terrible a thing in the end. It’s simply the product of knocking off the rough edges and updating the firmware as I continue my ongoing self-analysis. Living is a continual process of self-improvement and if I can’t see my psychological issues and work on fixing them, they’ll be there to trip me up later down the line, so it’s in my best interest to initiate bug fixes as I go along. And if those fixes change the kernel then it’s only going to improve function. The person I was yesterday should never be the person that I am tomorrow because there is nothing so abhorrent as stasis.
The main thrust of sales is always to sell to what the customer believes purchasing a certain product or service says about them. You can get into the technical details and the literal truth of what the product can do for them later in the negotiation. Essentially, the message is always that owning product X tells the world that you have quality Y. It communicates, at a glance, that you are a certain type of person, or at least aspire to be. Your brand of watch or choice of cufflinks over knots conveys something about you, and that image is, usually, what you want people to think about you. Though plenty of times that tends to get lost in translation because your signifiers aren’t necessarily shared . E.g. If you drive around revving your Aston Martin DB9 you probably expect that it conveys that you are exciting, daring and monied, and it probably does convey the latter across the board, on top of telegraphing that you don’t know how to change gears.
Thus the crux of the matter. He wants to be perceived in a certain way and I’m, apparently, an accessory to that aspiration. By behaving in a certain manner generally I’m conveying that I’m easy to get along with, on top of a layer of being known to get the job done, by bringing the right people together and/or applying the correct logic to fix things. I’m also, as a result of this, rather good at making the person I’m with look good. Things as basic as having a good memory for details and prompting him to tell a funny anecdote or adding a throw away humorous line to something he’s saying all make him look more witty than he may or may not actually be. Certainly, the close proximity quite likely makes him look desirable, and in the crudest of sales fashions, generates interest, at least in what’s going on, as a starting point. So fine, I’ll help him present that façade to the public, though I’m keenly aware that there seems to be a very real underlying issue as to why he’s trying to present that particular image. In the long-term, it’s not going to help him and will simply reinforce the internalising he’s done about this issue. But there’s nothing I can do to change that, and I’m not sure, after everything I’ve been put through, that I would even bother to try if I could. If he wants to carry on this farce I’ll help, in so far as it’s useful for me to do so, but I’ll be plotting my own course as a focus. If it takes my assisting him to get what I want out of him then bring it on. I should long ago have stopped being surprised as people’s lack of self-awareness and refusal to face self-analysis.
Thinking about it in those terms, perhaps my adaptability isn’t so terrible a thing in the end. It’s simply the product of knocking off the rough edges and updating the firmware as I continue my ongoing self-analysis. Living is a continual process of self-improvement and if I can’t see my psychological issues and work on fixing them, they’ll be there to trip me up later down the line, so it’s in my best interest to initiate bug fixes as I go along. And if those fixes change the kernel then it’s only going to improve function. The person I was yesterday should never be the person that I am tomorrow because there is nothing so abhorrent as stasis.
