The Joneses (2009)
A family moves into an affluent suburb and is admired for their taste, their possessions and their apparent ease. They are not a family. They are a unit of stealth marketers, placed to make their neighbours want what they have. The premise is better than the film, and the premise is worth an hour of anyone's attention.
Trailer: Official trailer.
What it is
Derrick Borte’s 2009 film with David Duchovny and Demi Moore as two of the four operatives, selling by being envied rather than by advertising.
What it gets right about the trade
Social proof as a product. The entire operation rests on Cialdini’s principle: people decide what to want by observing what people like them already have. The film dramatises it more clearly than any explanation.
The absence of a message. The Joneses never make a claim. They own things and are admired. That is the whole mechanism and it is precisely why it works, because there is nothing to argue with.
It anticipates the influencer economy by several years. Made before the model was named, it describes it exactly: paid people performing an aspirational life, with the commercial relationship concealed.
What it gets wrong
The film loses its nerve. It sets up a sharp satire and resolves into a conventional drama about the characters’ feelings, which is less interesting than the premise it abandoned.
It also treats the mechanism as exotic. By 2009 it was not, and it is now entirely ordinary and partly regulated. Disclosure rules in most markets now require exactly what the Joneses conceal, which dates the film in a useful way.
The one part worth showing a team
The scene where a neighbour, having bought everything the Joneses have, cannot afford it and the consequence lands.
Show it when discussing influencer work, because it is the clearest statement of who carries the cost when aspiration is manufactured well. The question is not whether the technique works. It is what happens to the person it works on.
If you run the company rather than the marketing
The relevant issue here is disclosure, and it is a live compliance question rather than a philosophical one.
Undisclosed paid endorsement is now regulated in most of the markets you operate in, and enforcement has been getting less forgiving. If your company pays anybody to talk about it, including employees with their own audiences, the commercial relationship has to be visible.
Two practical things. Put the disclosure requirement in the contract rather than in a briefing email, so it is enforceable. And decide who checks that it actually happened, because in most companies nobody does and the exposure sits with you rather than with the creator.
The broader point the film makes is worth keeping too. Manufactured aspiration works, and it works on people who cannot afford the thing. In a B2B context the equivalent is selling a capability to a company that does not have the maturity to use it. It closes, and it churns, and it costs you a reference.
Sources
Directed by Derrick Borte, 2009.