Why people are suspicious of network marketing

People are prepared to accept the grind of life but not that there is an honest alternative

It’s a funny thing, the human mind. It’s prepared to accept and reject the most bizarre things sometimes.

For example, some people have faith in their god. I admire that because it shows that people are strong minded and they believe in something. They will have moments of doubt about their beliefs, of course, but they fall back on their values, their faith and their community to help them keep on track.

In our working lives, we are educated, trained and conditioned to work in a routine that revolves around our societies working in a routine which, in general, a day which starts at about 9am and finishes at about 5pm.

To get to our places of work or study, we all set off at about the same time and try to get through an infrastructure which cannot cope with the numbers of people who want to get through a space designed for fewer numbers. This is why traffic jams occur at the same time and place each day, and which many people just sit through because they think they have no other alternative to this routine. People accept this bizarre waste of time and only feel able to express their exasperation by honking their horn or swearing at other people in the same jam.

And yet, with small adjustments to your daily routine, you can travel the same way to work in much less time, be more productive at work and feel less stressed by simply, say, working from home for an hour in the morning when you would normally be in the car thereby missing the ‘rush hour’. Try it. If you have a job which allows a little flexibility then ask for it. It will change your life in a small but significant way.

When it comes to network marketing or ‘team marketing’ people dismiss it as ‘pyramid selling’. Their perception of network marketing is one of innocent or vulnerable people buying a stack of products from the top of the ‘pyramid’ and desperately trying to sell it to people lower than them in the pyramid. That could not be further from the truth.

Network marketing is a distribution strategy which cuts out the traditional route that products take to reach their market from the manufacturer such as agents, distributors, wholesalers, sales people and retailers and which provides a greater share of the profits to the manufacturer and the distributor.

Part of my working life in a traditional business involved me persuading wholesalers to buy a large amount of products of which I would only accept a small amount of their orders to be returned to our business if they did not sell it. My customers had to make a calculated risk on how much they thought they could sell to their customers knowing that mistakes in purchasing would cost them a lot of money. Far from being vulnerable, my customers in that business were very astute and had a lot of market knowledge which enable them to forecast their sales and, therefor, their purchases.

This is the vital factor for why pyramid schemes were so bad because innocent and naive people bought products, such as water filters, about which they had no information about the real market for these products compared to highly skilled and experienced buyers in professional companies.

In good network marketing companies, the manufacturer supplies all of its distributors directly at the same price at all levels of the team. Products are ordered by the distributor when a customer orders and pays for them. Anyone who has any business sense knows that this is good business. No stock is held by the distributor. Cash flow is good because no money is tied up in unsold stock. Distributors are rewarded for training other people in their teams who sell products as a consequence of the training. It’s a business, remember, and products need to be bought and sold.

So, why are people suspicious of network marketing? It comes down to two things. Firstly, the bad experiences of people who were scammed by pyramid schemes in the 1970’s still linger in people’s conscience. They have a blind reaction to something which was made illegal nearly thirty years ago and they have no desire to seek to understand how network marketing works.

Secondly, we are conditioned to believe that there is only one honourable way for businesses to work because this is how everyone else is carrying out business. People are more prepared to put up with the grind of their daily routines than they are prepared to get into a business which will allow them all to achieve all of the things that they dream about doing with their lives rather than what their employers allow them to do. People are prepared to take huge risks with new business ventures which fail more often than they succeed, and which run the risk of them losing their health, wealth and families than they are to get into a business which has no financial risks and which has a simple, proven business model.

So, if you are suspicious about network marketing and you think it is nothing more than a shoddy pyramid scheme, then I suggest you do two things. Firstly, contact me so I can show you what a good, honest and ethical business I am part of and running. Secondly, come along to one of our events and meet other decent, honest people I work with who will never put you under pressure to enter a business which you don’t first understand.

When you have done this, then you might grasp just how amazingly good network marketing business can be for anyone who is prepared to persist with a simple, proven business which changes people’s lives for the better.

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