Hello everyone, I hope all of you are having a good day. I am an MBA student and also a marketing enthusiast. I would like to share with you all about general marketing trends and other concepts on a weekly basis by the medium of this blog. The whole process should be engaging and informative with live examples if possible so that everyone can understand it properly. I do encourage readers who are interested in sharing similar content to mail us on contact@ahelptoyou.in and you can also share with us additional content regarding any topic you are interested in and have knowledge of the same.
INTRODUCTION
So, without wasting any more time, the topic for today is MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) also known as Network Marketing. I am sure all of you might know or have heard about the basics of this topic in one way or another. I got to know more about this when I was doing my internship with a esteemed organization. I was appointed as a social media marketing intern and my first task was to boost the followers on the official page of the organization. Well, there are a lot of ways to do so but what we are going to discuss today is restricted to MLM.
EXPLANATION
So, let’s take an example for better understanding, say you want to bring 100 followers to any page. How do you go forward with this goal? Obviously one of the ways would be to ask your first network connections like friends, family and colleagues to follow that page, but what if u still don’t have enough people to reach the target. That’s where MLM comes into picture. You convince 10 people you know to follow the page and ask those 10 people to convince other 10 people they know for following the page and in no time you will easily have more than your target of 100 followers. Now of course the number of people you can convince and the number of people those people can convince may differ and not always the goal would be just to increase the number of followers on a page. The end goal can be anything from providing services to new potential customers, for better reach of your services, being able to share your idea or your brand image among people in a certain way. A great example of this concept is portrayed in a Bollywood movie named as Jai Ho as well. There are many applications of this concept. The example I gave earlier didn’t have money involved in it. In other organizations where MLM comes into picture, an employee would be asked to sell their product or services to the customer and for every sale he or she does the employee would get a percent of commission on it over his or her basic salary. Even this is a possibility that there is no fixed salary for the employee and the only means for his or her income is dependent on the number of sales they bring to the company they work for and the incentive (variable salary) they get on it. In some cases, it is also possible the first network employee gets a higher cut on incentive over the second network employees working with them and this keeps going on as the network further branches out. So basically the higher you are on the chain of network the more incentives you might get. Now you know what MLM is now the question is, Is it really effective?
The answer to it is YES, it is really good for the company but not so much for the people who are working in this field as they are given targets to reach by converting sales. Now someone who is really good in the art of persuasion, interacting with others and other sales aspects will be really good in it. But for someone who is not good in persuasion, interactions and conversing with others, it is a difficult job to execute. Also, if MLM isn’t target oriented it is an interesting career if u just want to market your brand idea or product out there. You can also apply it for your own business, startup or anything else.
CONCLUSION
I would like to conclude by saying that MLM is definitely a trending concept and a very important one in Marketing, it has its own pros and cons but everyone interested in marketing should learn more about it and if possible, get some hands-on experience regarding it and then decide for yourselves whether you are interested in it or not. That’s all for today, do share your views and experiences regarding the same with us.