Quintin Jardine's blog

Yesterday I had an email from Marks & Spencer urging me to write a customer review for a pair of shorts I purchased on line. Occasionally I buy stuff on Amazon’s marketplace; when I am satisfied there I will always post a positive review of the seller’s performance . . . but not the product; to me the two are unrelated. When I am not, I won’t. However I do get a little annoyed when the UK’s biggest clothing store  tries to make me a voluntary arm of its marketing process. So I wrote a review, and submitted it; I couldn’t keep a copy, as it was on an M&S pro forma, but this is what it said, more or less:

I am posting this review because the pushy sales people at M&S asked me to. This is a mediocre garment and not under-priced in any way. It fits me and it meets my needs. However I cannot tell whether it will fit you or meet yours. In other words, I am not in a position to offer encouragement or discouragement to potential buyers. Now that I have done as they asked I hope that the pushy sales people at M&S will go away and will stop trying to use me to influence other innocent shoppers.

This morning I received another email from M&S. Surprise. My review has been rejected on the ground that it did not meet one or more of the company’s guidelines. I’ve just looked at those and can’t find a single clause that would have disqualified it from publication: other than this . . . it wasn’t what M&S wanted me to say.