The Crusade Against Big Business Begins...

I have just received a text. From my gym. It reads:

“Hi, only 6 days left to get a FREE MONTHS [sic] membership if you refer a friend to cannons. Call now…”

Lovefilm.com regularly sends me correspondence along the lines of:

“Recommend a friend and get 3 months rental free”

My mobile phone company can’t stop itself from exhorting me to:

“Persuade your mates and family to join us and you'll get £10 worth of airtime for every friend you connect”

While I get several text messages a month from Nike:

“Thanks for buying those pink lycra leggings. Snag another pair by exporting your brother to work in one of our sweatshops for six months. Reply Now!”

It appears that it is increasingly difficult these days to buy a product or service without being prompted to dob your family or mates in for financial gain. While I’m all for exploiting friends and family for monetary reward, I do take exception to Big Business removing the personal initiative from the whole enterprise. Where’s the fun in getting something for nothing when you’ve got some corporate sponsor telling you to do it? When did all this ‘refer a friend’ tyranny begin?

I object to these Faustian corporate urgings on a number of levels. Firstly, the ‘refer a friend’ tactic carries with it the assumption that its target actually has friends. This could well be an erroneous hypothesis and one which runs the risk of inducing additional trauma in the subject who may already be rueing his or her lonely existence and now finds this compounded by the fact that he or she finds themselves unable to pass on this wonderful retail opportunity (to their non-existent friends).

The second assumption made by these preachers of corporate conversion is that the subject’s friends will be of the unlikely disposition that they take any notice of the promptings or suggestions of said friend. These ‘trick your mate, get a quid’ messages also make the category mistake of believing that the subject’s friends are likely to listen favourably to the proposal when its proposer stands to benefit financially. If you doubt this, try asking your mates to go for a particular phone network, i.e. your one, when they next upgrade their phone. When you outline the benefits of the free off-peak minutes and the good coverage, their eyes will light up…when you finish your pitch with the words, “This is really good. You should go for it…and mention my number when you buy it and I get £10” you will get a less sympathetic response and you'll find they’d rather place their trust in the wisdom of the spotty seventeen year old in the Carphone Warehouse.

This being the case, surely these corporate urgings are doomed to failure? Surely very few people manage to exercise the nefarious means to bend the will of their mates to achieve their own financial reward? I’d be intrigued to know how many people managed to get their friends to sign up for any of these deals.

But I’m not only intrigued…I’m outraged. I mean, what are they trying to do? Turn us all into automatrons, feeding instructions into our ears & eyes so as to propagate their dirty commercial message? I might be getting this out of proportion but I’m declaring the foundation of a campaign against corporate snitching. Text your mates and get them to join.