Breaking Up With Multi-Level Marketing Is Harder Than It Sounds
A new book explores why multi-level marketing schemes are still popular — and legal — even though so many people lose money in them.
Illustration: Saehan Parc for Bloomberg
Let’s say you have a product you want to sell. It could be anything: make-up, clothes, jewelry, cleaning products, meal kits, weight-loss plans, maybe vitamins. Maybe you have a background in science and nutrition and have carefully crafted something to help people meet a known nutritional deficiency. Or maybe you just want to make a buck.
There are two ways to persuade people to buy your vitamins. You can sell them in a store and hope customers come to you, or you can take your vitamins to potential customers, either by going door-to-door or, as is more likely these days, selling them online. This is known as “direct selling.”