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Do you want to work from home and earn money that is plenty enough for you to afford just about anything you want — be it exotic trips, sport cars, mansions, you name it?
Howdy folks!
Do you want to make lots of money, say US$500,000 in just six months?
Do you want to work from home and earn money that is plenty enough for you to afford just about anything you want — be it exotic trips, sport cars, mansions, you name it?
Do you want to work at your own pace while having the independence to do other things?
If your answer is a gullible “yes” to all the above questions — then welcome to the world of network marketing, albeit with a heavy heart.
It appears like the use of the hard currency has exposed us to every trick in the book, with network marketing seeming to be deeply rooted in the country.
Some call it multilevel or referral marketing.
This type of marketing has become rampant in Zimbabwe and is often used and abused by some foreign companies who offer questionable (at least according to me) products and services.
These companies may be selling health products, holiday trips or investment books. More are adding up to that list regularly.
The companies do their marketing through a multi-layered system of independent salespeople who are not only there to sell the products or services offered by that particular company but to also recruit new sales representatives.
You are usually required to pay a joining fee then also pay an additional amount to get the products that are useless (my subjective opinion). That you have to part with your hard-earned money to join these schemes makes me wonder how different they are from those lottery scams where you receive an email informing you that you have won a lottery prize and that for you claim the money you first have to pay a “processing fee” or a “levy”.
The way I see it, the only difference is that the lottery scam is an illegal way of fleecing money from people while the network marketing approach sounds legit.
A renowned multilevel marketing critique, Robert Fitzpatrick, is on record saying that 91 percent of network marketing participants don’t ever make a net profit.
They just but toil for nothing. And you can imagine the number of people who are ardently into this! Their exuberance is just remarkable.
Will they achieve the Zimbabwean dream this way?
Who hasn’t been invited to those business opportunity seminars to explain how the schemes work?
The presenters there will unleash polished acts of their motivational speeches, with testimonies also being used to drive the point home.
Some may be compelled to lie just to give a good impression to the prospective recruit. They just have to, otherwise nobody would take them seriously.
But you can see right through their eyes that some guilty conscience is engrossing them deep inside. The interesting thing is that the products sold by these network marketing companies tend to be overpriced when compared to their conventional substitutes.
And given how all those companies are foreign, the liquidity situation in the country will surely worsen as more leakages are realised from the national circular flow of income as new members join and pay up their dues – and the money is sent abroad.
Nobody seems to care to ask whether it will be possible to earn the amount of money that is normally mentioned to lure prospective members.
Just a promise without considering the market dynamics.
If 20 000 people were to join a scheme where they earn US$500,000, it hypothetically means that they are to earn up to US$10 billion in total. Do we have that kind of money in the country?
And if you begin to add other network marketing companies to the above hypothesis, you will clearly see how unrealistic those exponential projections are — just join five people and those five people will each join five people… it goes on and on. We are only 13 million folks in the country, lets not forget that.
Taking that example of being promised to earn as much as US$500,000, you are only required to pay a sign up fee of US$18. Again, let’s assume that every Zimbabwean signs up.
US$234 million (13 million X $18) can be realised. And less than 500 people can get US$500,000 each out of that money. This just demonstrates how flawed network marketing is, how it only seeks to enrich those who established it by taking money out of the country and leaving us stuck with mediocre products.
And is there some sort of differentiation in the types of products offered? The impression I have seen so far is that the products on sale are just mass produced and assumed to be one-size-fit-all.
Take the investment books, for instance, will their investment counsel apply to people in different markets – third world, developed world, resource-endowed, you name it, or they just hold all these variables being equal?
Given how expensive the products are, the convenient way for the salespeople to make some money is by recruiting more members who will pay their joining fee to be admitted – which makes it look like a pyramid scheme. And those job adverts for “marketing agents to work for an international company” populating the classifieds sections of our newspapers somehow prove that the focus is not really on selling the products but just to make the next person join.
The exponential expansion of agents takes place. The pyramid grows. I don’t want to doubt our ability to build pyramids as Zimbabweans, we can even build and complete the tower of Babel.
Remember, several centuries back, we built the tower of stones, six metres thick and twelve metres long – without mortar – at Great Zimbabwe, while the very white men who now want to give us network marketing were still emerging from the Dark Age. So, yes we can build pyramids – just not these types of pyramids please!
The sad reality is that the those salespeople end up being stuck with their health products and, being desperate to make a sale, can claim fictitious things about those products.
The salesperson is also assuming many roles at one time – they are a human resources officer, brand ambassador, pharmacist, stores person, finance officer – and we know that they can’t really optimally harness all these faculties simultaneously, especially when driven by the commission motive.
Somehow they can be inclined to compromise.
Perhaps the only network marketing scheme that can impress me is one that is established from Zimbabwe, selling proudly Zimbabwean products.
If Zinatha is to produce traditional herbs for various ailments, and choose to take the network marketing route, this cowboy will certainly not have problems parting with his hard currency to be part of that initiative.
It is my view that these foreign network marketing firms operating in the country should be investigated. Organisations such as the Consumer Council of Zimbabwe should research further and determine whether the consumer is not being led down the garden path.
The public should be also warned that not all that glitter is gold.
They should always understand the products they are selling.
A few years ago, one of my relatives ended up being in jail after unwittingly and gullibly subscribing to a pyramid scheme.
Later folks!
Online Reporter