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I do have a couple of reservations, though.

First, the name “network marketing” is a misnomer except as it applies to the company’s business model. Distributors do NOT market in any strict sense. The company’s marketing is done by the back-room professionals with degrees and diplomas in marketing who work in its marketing department.

Almost no consumer ever has direct contact with a real marketer. What they DO have regular contact with is SELLERS who implement the sales strategies and tactics created by the marketing department.

Sellers are, by nature and absolute requirement for survival, opportunists. That’s perfectly proper — unless they abuse their position. One of the lasting legacies of the advent of professional marketing departments in the 1950s and 1960s was the hijacking of the hip new marketing language by sellers looking for an edge over their competition. The problem was they had little or no idea of the very specific meanings of the terms they hijacked, so they made up their own SALES dialect, using marketing language.

The conflict and confusion this created between marketing and sales departments in companies everywhere still lingers on today.

As my colleague and friend, Rob Frankel of FrankelBiz, wrote in his excellent book “The Revenge of Brand X”, one of the simplest ways to identify a company that has NO clue about marketing, is to see if anyone in the company has the title “Sales & Marketing Manager”. That’s a dead giveaway.

The bottom line is this (and Yvette is correct): the distributor network is nothing more than a network marketing company’s independent, outsourced SALES department.

Get over it and get on with the ONLY role in any business that brings in the money to pay everyone, including the marketing department!

John

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Jim Rohn International did and does offer tons of quality motivational products for sale. The promotional literature I have received from them follows all the Introducing, qualifying, objection-overcoming, sense of urgency creating methods every successful sales organization follows.

Unless every distributor Dave has signed up joined his business the first time he showed them the plan or products ( a statistical near-impossibility) he had to do some follow up, questioning and objection overcoming to successfully sponsor them into his business, in short he had to “sell” them on taking a look at the products or business. It would be better for the industry if we told people that it does involve selling and they were okay with that and joined and found out it doesn’t involve selling than telling people it doesn’t involve selling, then asking them to go out and try to convince their family and friends to invest their time and money in something they neither needed nor wanted. In the non-MLM world where our potential customers and business partners live there is a term for this kind of behavior: bait-and-switch.

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What would spark someone to “generate a marketing plan” outside of what the corps fundamentals of building a successful business dictates.

Your premise that one must create flies in the face of the essential attraction of Mlm- simplicity. The late Jim Rohn taught us we need only do 3 things:
1. Learn the skill of getting customers.
2. Learn the skill of a good invitation.
3. Train large numbers to do 1 &2 (training events).

Anyone espousing other ideas is simply another voice in the crowd shouting “check me out! Look at me!” – and who isn’t leading from the trenches.

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