Personal selling is something we encounter a lot of the time—I like to think it’s something I can spot a mile off, but it’s not always so clear, as The Joneses tries to illustrate.

The way the Jones family sell products in this film could be viewed as an extreme version of personal selling. We are presented with their neighbor (Summer Symonds) as a more typical version of such a tactic, as she sells her beauty products the same way we might be familiar with Avon or even the Allez Vous line on Schitt’s Creek. Summer’s methods are more transparent, as we see at her gala event and her clumsy introduction to the Joneses when they first move in. Conversely, the Joneses have a more elaborate and all-consuming personal sales technique.

The Joneses identify specific demographic segments that each of them target in their various ways, and their whole lives are dedicated to putting on a show of being a real family who genuinely enjoy and recommend specific products to their “friends.” This is not entirely ethical, as while personal selling is typically identifiable as such, it isn’t entirely clear here if they genuinely like and recommend the products or not.

I think there are referral programs that fall into a similar gray area – consumers do use the products they are recommending, but there is an undisclosed benefit to them when their recommendation results in a sale. Companies that spring to mind with regards to referrals that benefit the referrer include Mint Mobile and Prose (which a friend just recommended to me and then followed up with a second text a day later to tell me about the referral bonus to her…). I don’t mind it in a context where you expect it, or where it is disclosed, but I would certainly feel angry if a “friend” did something like the Joneses did (indeed, I don’t think I could call them friends if their whole life was a fiction in the way they are shown in the film!).