[Annan]

Originally Posted by GTC

It's a completely legitimate concern if it can effect your business, positive or negative. E.g., PR agencies exist by tending the perception of one group on another, or publicists often by tending the perception of a group on an individual or project like a movie. There are numerous policies in the state law enforcement agency I serve that are mostly or exclusively about the perception of the public.

Tending perception by itself is not overly egocentric; it is the motive for why it is being tended that can make it a problem. If you're tending perception in order to keep your clients, constituents, or the public you serve the most comfortable with you, that could be a legitimate expression of that kind of relational management. If on the other hand you just have to wear a Rolex in order to deceive people in to thinking you're a person of greater means than you actually are, or to communicate your actual affluence in order to feel better about yourself, well I would respectfully suggest that's more the kind of problem you allude to in your post; and, the latter reason maybe is what the add two posts above is trying to pander to.

Buy a Timex and be done with it.