Multi Level Marketing or network marketing is like the hydra or a nasty rash. No matter how many times it fails and burns people, up it springs again, sucking in the unwary and the credulous. Hope springs eternal in the hearts of countless MLM’ers, who pine for wealth and strive in penury while a very, very select few make pots of boodle.
The other day I got the following e-mail from what appears to be a professional MLM’er in New Zealand, to which I’ve responded privately. I’m not really sure why Kiwi Jeff is writing to me. Does he seek to inform me, convert me or does he want to know something? I’m not clear. But I think it worth sharing his letter (with some minor name changes) since it illustrates some points about how MLM operates.
Hi from New Zealand
I came across your article with respect to Network Marketing and USANA. I am interested in your comments on a company called Pharmanex owned by Nu Skin Enterprises due to launch in Indonesia in June 2005. They have been ranked as one of the top supplements in their categories by <www.supplement.com» an independent supplement watch dog. They also have a very interesting technology called a BioPhotonic Scanner which measures carotenoid antioxidant levels. It is backed by Lester Packer the #1 guy in antioxidant research.
I haven't read your previous articles on MLM but can read you have had a bad experience.
I look forward to your reply
Sincerely,
Kiwi Jeff
Team Excellence Founder, eTeam World Partners “Together Everyone Achieves More!”
First thing to note about this is Kiwi Jeff is the founder of something called “Team Excellence” and is the founder of an organisation called eTeam World Partners with the startlingly original exhortation ”Together Everyone Achieves More!”.
The next thing to note that Pharmanex/Nu Skin are due to launch in Indonesia in June 2005. You have been warned! It is not clear from his letter whether Kiwi Jeff works with USANA, Nu Skin/Pharmanex, neither or both.
People like Kiwi Jeff who run organisations like Team Excellence work with one or sometimes several MLM companies selling a variety of products. They build up a pyramid or cadre of people in their own and other countries who, like themselves, hope to make a fortune by creating a downline of independent distributors, with themselves at the apex. They in their turn were signed up by someone, who is most usually a member of a parent distributor organisation in the US, though never from the original MLM company itself. As soon as the MLM company opens up in a new market at the behest of their biggest distributors, people like Kiwi Jeff will descend on the new country, in this case Indonesia, to sign up the locals who are told they are getting in on the ground floor and can make a fortune. A few will, most won’t.
Kiwi Jeff does not sell product any more, if he ever did. He is in the business of signing up people. That is why he, and others like him will be jetting into Jakarta between now and June, staying at the swankest 5-star hotels and meeting a succession of local prospects. He is willing to chat up and sign up just about anyone in the search for those few natural-born direct marketers who will make him and themselves rich on the back of thousands of others, whose dreams of wealth and independence will remain pie in the sky. Kiwi Jeff is prepared to spend quite a lot of time and money visiting and training his prospects. He will go to great lengths to support and encourage his people with dreams of success just so long as they remain active and just might lead him to that rarity, the star network marketer.
In his short letter to me Kiwi Jeff resorts to a classic MLM ploy no less than twice. This involves associating your business or product with an expert individual, professional association or valid research without any real justification for doing so. Kiwi Jeff refers to www.supplement.com as an “independent supplement watchdog” organisation that ranks his product among the top. I visited the website and it is nothing of the sort. It is a commercial site selling nutritional supplements from many different makers. It does not appear to give any ranking and I would not trust what it said if it did. It has no independent professional standing of any kind that I can see.
Next Kiwi Jeff refers to a box of tricks called a BioPhotonic Scanner, which tells if you are antioxidant deprived and which is endorsed by a man called Lester Packer, whom we are told is the “No.1 man in antioxidants”. Well there are many tests you can take to ascertain various antioxidant levels but what do you think this machine in the hands of MLM’ers flogging antioxidants is going to tell you? Yep, you got it. You are deficient and need to buy their antiox pills. I also know of many leading proponents of the antioxidant theory, to which I subscribe, but Lester Packer is not one of them.
So here’s what Jeff and his team will do for you. Train you and support you so you know how to sign up the next punter in the hope and expectation that he will grow fat on the residual commissions you and others like you will earn him. You will have the run of Nu Skin cosmetic products, Pharmanex nutritional health products to sell and a gizmo to prove to people they are deficient and need to pop your pills if they want to stay healthy.
Kiwi Jeff concludes by saying I have obviously had a bad experience with MLM. The inference being presumably, that otherwise I could not possibly say such negative things about MLM or that I must have come across one of the few bad apples that can happen in any industry. Bad assumption, Jeff. My limited personal experience of MLM has not been bad. I have bought MLM products in the past for a while because I found a few to be good products. I stopped because I found better and cheaper equivalents that were a lot easier to purchase in the normal way. No, it was precisely because I was interested in the phenomenon and promise of MLM as a business that I researched it. Having found out the promises are false ones for the vast majority of people is for me neither a good nor a bad experience. It is merely the way it is.
There is often something a bit cultish and religious about MLM’ers. As long as you subscribe to the creed and play the game you are supported and among friends, even if you aren’t much good at it. You swell the audience of the true believers, you buy product every month and you just might sign up a star performer one of these days. You are valued, even if just as a grunt. Negativity within is not tolerated and leads to a withdrawal of support and isolation. Asking awkward questions is negative. From without, criticism is regarded rather like an attack on religion. Anyone who does it is obviously an atheist, hostile to truth and therefore anything they say can be disregarded.
I was once privy to a correspondence illustrating this. A senior level distributor wrote to his big boss and mentor, complaining of what I’d written about his product and organisation.
“
If one of my people reads this and asks me about it, how on earth do I respond? Obviously this guy has a problem, but he’s done his research and I don’t know how to answer what he says....”.
His upline mentor wiser, richer and a lot more cynical said, “Ah, just forget it. People believe what they want to believe”.
What else is there to learn from Kiwi Jeff’s letter? In brief, it looks like Nu Skin and Pharmanex are coming to Indonesia next year. What of that? Nu Skin is one of the largest and most successful MLM companies in the world. It sells good products, usually cosmetics and nutritional health foods. A couple of years back Nu Skin acquired Pharmanex, a US company, whose main claim to fame was a patented red yeast rice extract, a natural anti-cholesterol agent which was shamefully driven off the market by litigation from one of the major pharmaceutical companies, who claimed it acted in the same way as one of their statin drugs and hence infringed their patent.
The assertions made in Kiwi Jeff’s letter do not stack up under investigation. You can buy similar if not better products than the Nu Skin and Pharmanex ranges on the open market, without going through the rigmarole of becoming an MLM’er. For those of you interested in a natural non-drug anti-cholesterol agent there are now many excellent brands of red rice yeast extract available on the shelves of any good health store.
Kiwi Jeff also mentions USANA, a solid MLM company, making quality health supplements. But their products are over-hyped and over-priced. You can do much better outside of MLM.
The founder of Nu Skin himself said 97% of people in MLM don’t make it. If you think you are among that very special 3% then Nu Skin and Pharmanex are about as good as it gets in MLM and you should give it a go.
