Network Marketing has been around a lot longer than a lot of people think.
It started back in the 1930's with direct selling. Do you remember the insurance salesman that knocked on your door at dinnertime to try to sell you a life insurance policy? Then came franchising in the 1940s with the invention of McDonalds and Holiday Inn. Franchising was revolutionary since it introduced the "system" for managing the business processes and the ways of working. In the 1950s, multi-level marketing was born. Amway is the most well-known company from this era and introduced what a lot of people thought was a pyramid. Ironically, the Amway organization is closer to horizontal marketing and isn't any more than a pyramid than the typical corporate organization. Then came the 1960s, the big catalog was introduced. Think JCPenney or Sears. For the first time, you can "shop from home" and call a toll free number to order your favorite product. In the 1970s, businesses of all sizes started to use direct mail to market their products and services. These brochures would be mixed in with your bills in the mail and allowed consumers to save money on services. In the 1980s, cable television changed not only what we watch on TV, bu how we shop. For the first time, infomericals were born. QVC and the Home Shopping Network allowed viewers to see product demostrations and then order the product via a toll-free number. This was start of the saving trees movement with less paper in the ol' mailbox. As we moved into the 1990s, another drastic movement in network marketing happened, the internet and the dot.com era. For the first time, consumers were able to shop online at their favorite stores and use credit cards or tools like PayPal to purchase products and services. While the ease of shopping online created a whole new paradigm, for the first time, you started to see the brick and mortar stores start to suffer. Think Caldor, Lechmere, Bradlees and Ames.
So then came the 21st Century... the 2000s-2010s! A new paradigm invented by Market America's founder, James Ridinger, took the best of all of the network marketing stages from the 1930s till 2000 and called it one-to-one marketing. With almost 200,000 distributors marketing cutting edge products and services and partnering with all of the retail stores that helped start the paradigms from the 1970s through the 1990s, one-to-one marketing was born. One-to-one marketing is where you have a personal shop consultant (think the old insurance salesman from the 1930s) who follows a system invented from franchising to assist shoppers to research what they need through a catalog and make a purchase on an online shopping site. It is pretty revolutionary and it is now the best way to connect people to the products they need. What better way to build a one-to-one relationship?
Network Marketing is in fact the Business of the 21st Century. Pretty exciting stuff!
