The History and Truth of Network Marketing

The History and Truth of Network Marketing

MLM Secret, MLM Truth, Network Marketing Secret, Network Marketing Truth, by Greg Stewart Enlightenment vs. En-dark-enment the most fundamental fact of life in our world today is change. As a rule, people are reluctant to change.

We resist it, we like to stay within our comfort zone of what is known and accepted by most. THIS IS HUMAN NATURE. But it's true that what you resist will persist, especially when you resist a better method whose time has come. In almost every field of endeavor, the arts, sciences, medicine, and business, most new ideas have always met with resistance and rejection at first. The more unique and revolutionary the idea, the louder and stronger the opposition to it. People have always been afraid and even ignorant about ideas and methods that may result in change. Fear of change caused ridicule of Christopher Columbus, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein. There are other examples of how fear of change had effects on progress. In the 1800's, people bought what they needed at small, family owned shops. Then a man named W.T. Grant had an idea that created change. What if we combined all these separate, little shops by making 9them individual departments under one roof, in one large store? A new and better way of doing things. Customers loved it. The individual merchants who owned the old-fashioned retail stores saw their businesses decline. The shopkeepers fought back politically . There were thousands of them with thousands of votes, and they lobbied for their right to do things the same old way. They finally got the local and state governments to outlaw Grant's department stores. Eventually, Grant's department store won out. If there is a better way it will persist. In the early 1960's franchising was a revolutionary new technology in business, and it was also met with resistance. Newspapers and magazines wrote what a scam and rip-off franchising was. Stories of people who lost their life savings to some franchise were everywhere. There was a strong move to make franchising illegal. In fact,  franchising actually came within 11 votes of being outlawed by Congress. Today this so-called scam is responsible for over 34 percent of all retail sales in North America. Franchises sell nearly 800 billion dollars worth of goods and services today. Every industry goes through an evolution similar to this. Chiropractors were considered quacks in the 1970's, the stock market was considered shady and a form of gambling, and the first newspaper in British North America, The Public Occurrence (1690), was suppressed by the governor of Massachusetts. Now, we almost can't do without these industries. The Pioneers satisfied customers, most of whom were family and friends, who each had the same right to offer the product and representative status to others, which allowed the sales force to grow exponentially. The company rewarded them for the sales produced by their entire group or network of sales representatives. Network Marketing was born! A few years later, the company changed its name to NutraLite Food Supplement Corporations. In 1956, NutraLite was joined in Network Marketing by Dr. Forrest Shaklee to gain a broader distribution of the food supplements he had developed. Not long after, in 1959, former NutraLite distributors Rich DeVoss and Jay Van Andel started the Amway company as the American Way of marketing products. Like many truly innovative breakthroughs, the development of true network marketing was an accident. 10Abuses of exponential growth haunted network marketing for years and it is still misunderstood today. One of the first abuses of the concept of exponential growth to generate income may have been the chain letter craze that swept the U.S. after World War I. The letters promised great profit if you would send a dime or a dollar to the person at the bottom. The chain letters spread as far as Europe, and by the 1930's the U.S. post office estimated that 10 million letters were being mailed each day. Postal Authorities and law enforcement agencies battled the fraudulent schemes and the chain letter phenomenon began to subside in the early 1940s. Unfortunately, this scam spawned schemes which came to be known as pyramids, where money was given for the right to involve others, as no valid product which was being purchased from the company. In 1974, Senator Walter Mondale declared such companies to be the nation's number one consumer fraud. Law enforcement agencies moved quickly to clean up the abuses. In the mid 1970's, with no clear understanding of what constituted a legitimate use of network marketing, the Federa Trade Commissionand state agencies across the nation turned their eyes to almost all network marketing companies. In 1975, the FTC filed suit against Amway, alleging that the company was an illegal pyramid and that its refusal to sell its products in retail stores constituted a restraint of trade. Amway spent four years and millions of dollars in legal fees to clear its name. In 1979 the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) ruled that Amway was not a pyramid, that its revenue was generated from the sale of its products, and the FTC acknowledged network marketing as a legal and efficient distribution system. Network Marketing exploded in the next decade.