Viral and MLM
There are numerous forms of marketing, all of which do involve memes at some level and can be examined and amplified using the noam framework. Of particular importance are viral marketing and multi-level marketing as these explicitly employ the idea of spreading the sales mechanism. To understand the difference between these replicating methods and what is termed here (albeit slightly inaccurately) as “direct” sales, then the familiar conventional direct the sales methods will be analysed and put into cliological framework terms. The distinctions between the direct and the replicating methods will show how the frameworks can be exploited to upregulate the fecundity of a sales network, thereby driving sales.
Direct marketing and selling
Trading, marketing, selling, advertising, promotion and so on, are well known in economics as being the exchange of demanded goods and services for some fungible currency. The terms customer and vendor might be applied in a transaction where the vendor provides the goods and services to the customer, and the customer provides the vendor with money.
In general, a customer has a set of values and is in a situation where they perceive that those values are not being entirely satisfied. The value of things are contextually dependent which includes the scarcity or surplus of access. They may have some resources (such as money) which they value, and they are prepared to exchanges that value in order to satisfy another value, on the basis that, in that situation, one value outweighs another: they are prepared to pay for a solution. To a thirsty person in a desert, money has far less value than water; they have a surplus of money and a scarcity of water, so they are prepared to part with money so as to obtain water.
A vendor also has a set of values, but these are the reverse of those of the customer, they have the solution to some problem, but they want money. They could have access to a surplus of a resource (such as water) and therefore that becomes less valuable to them than money. Money takes on its value as it allows them to buy solutions to vendor’s problems from other vendors.
In a market, there is a many-to-many relationship between customers and vendors (again the term is relative to money flow). Customers can have the same or similar problems and vendors can supply the same or similar solutions. The customers have a choice, and want, as described in the standard marketing mix (4Ps of marketing: price, product, promotion, place), the optimum cost to benefit ratio. To the vendors, in this view, it is about the money; they are seeking optimum profit, but they are in competition with other vendors for their market share. They have to apply their marketing mix so as to get a slice of the finite amount of money customers are willing to pay for solutions.
For a customer to chose from among the many vendors, then they select whichever marketing mix best suits theirs, and they need information upon which to make their selection. The vendors, on the other hand, have to provide such information and this could be in the form of a shopfront, advertising, or other means of self-promotion, this includes face-to-face sales, over the internet or by some other means. The vendor then needs to get the right message to the right target audience.
In order to get this message over, they need to know about the customers’ needs, what their competition is doing, what else is on the market, legislation, trends, channels by which to reach their targets, and to what kind of message their customers will respond to. Obtaining relevant market intelligence often goes under the banner of market research; on the flip side, that research becomes translated into a sales message to the customer, usually through advertising. This activity is a tall order and the reason for having marketing, PR, and advertising agencies. However, and especially when employing an agency, there is a significant cost and risk of doing necessary marketing and advertising, whether print, billboard, or broadcast. While the message has the potential to reach a large audience, advertising is one-way communication.
An alternative, though not exclusive, is to entice customers into buying through a sales team. The audience is smaller but more focussed and allows for immediate feedback from the customer in terms of objections. Rather than paying for adverts, commissions are paid as incentives for successful sales.
Ways of customer retention also include loyalty cards and reward points, which are more cost-effective than advertising costs and sales commissions.
These dynamics are covered in the direct sales example in the cliological frameworks.
WOM & viral marketing
Word of mouth, viral, network, multi-level, and other varients have similar aims for both the customer and vendor in satisfying needs, of solving problems and generating profit, but these systems apply a marketing mix that exploits our natural tendencies to share information with each other. The marketing message is essentially memetic.
Giving recommendations predates the internet. People have a tendency to boast about their good buys and praise excellent customer service while lambasting poor products and lousy service. Or friends often tell us their consumer tails whether we want to hear it or not. There is likely to be evolutionary psychology reason for this in that we signal to our tribe good sources of food and warn of dangers (much like the stotting of gazelles in the presence of a preditor). Such signalling is not only beneficial to the survival of the tribe but confers social status (if the signals are honest) that the messenger is a valuable source of information.
Whatever the evolutionary reasons, we tend to listen to people we know and trust, and to whom you are important, rather than some stranger with a self-serving agenda, and therefore are more likely to act upon that information. This is particularly pertinent when we are in the market for some solution to our problems but have too much of the wrong type of information. We can read all the adverts and sales pitches, which are obviously biased, but to hear what a friend with experience give their frank opinions is often the overriding factor in decision making.
Such guidance can be contagious. If someone acts on a friends recommendations, which turn out to be satisfying, then they are not only likely to give thankful feedback to their friend (a behavioural reinforcer) but also become likely to make similar recommendations to their other friends (raising the prospect of their own behavioural reinforcement). Furthermore, in a social network, the same recommendation may come from many sources, thereby amplifying the potency of the message.
Contagious recommendation is beneficial to the vendor, even if the message can get somewhat outside of their control. Viral forms of promotion have however been encouraged and harnessed in both face-to-face sales and across the internet.
Simple referral rewards and Multi-level marketing (MLM) predates the internet by some time. A referral reward is a payment, a kind of finder’s fee, or commission, or other gifts, that is offered to someone should they tell a friend who then becomes a customer. Essentially the referrer is acting as a commissioned salesperson. Should that friend then introduce one of their friends then that person would receive a reward, although the original referrer gains no tangible benefit. The rewards operate on a single level, however the incentives do enable the offer to spread through social networks. Multi-level schemes, on the other hand, not only provide a commission to the immediate referrer, but also provide a smaller commission to the person who referred the referrer. Clearly this can become a recursive chain, and some compensation plans provide commission for referral quite some levels away from the actual sale. Furthermore, as a referrer can make many referrals, then the chain can become a tree whereby a commissioned sales team is built up. While the commissions may lessen the further down the line the actual sale is, the number of sales will increase owing to having a larger downline team. An early referrer (frontliner) can, therefore, create a residual income through recruiting a few key people who spread the idea. It is still in the upline’s interest to incent and motivate their downlines. The vendor can reach a large target market through paying commissions that filter through the network without doing any advertising.
The memetic properties are very much in evidence in MLM. It is a replicating pattern of behaviour that spreads through a social network. The scheme is the meme that provides a structure for both sales of goods and recruitment of downlines. It is of high-fidelity as the recruits tend not to be loose-cannons, but follow the system through regular training sessions with high performing uplines. MLM schemes are also incented (or “incentivized”) through compensation plans which not only motivate sales, recruitment, and provide encouragement to the downline to duplicate that effort, but also to adhere to a tried and trusted plan.
Pure memes, Ponzi schemes and pyramids
It is possible for some schemes to forget about actually having a real product and simply become a money game. This is the case where some fee is paid for being allowed into the scheme on the premise that membership produces a residual from the joining fees of downline recruits. Typical of this are Ponzi or pyramid schemes, which are illegal in most jurisdictions as no real income is generated through the sales of goods. Some schemes get around this need to provide something tangible by providing products of dubious value, such as limited art prints. Such schemes may be beneficial for the front-liners, or early recruits, but as they are generating no real income through sales, will inevitably suffer from entropy and saturation and collapse, leaving the later suckers out of pocket.
The dynamics tend to be, as one scheme is on the verge of collapse, another (usually suspiciously similar and instigated by the same people) is ready for launch. There is then a rush migration by frontliners to bring their existing networks and get in early.
In memetic terms, this is a pure meme and it is maladaptive. It is being pushed through the incentives for doing nothing other than spreading the meme (no real sales) under the promise of a big payout at some point. As one particular pyramid dies out, its memes are inherited by its successor.
Multi-level marketing should not be confused with pyramid marketing, however. MLM is legal, do provide excellent products and service, and are highly ethical and stable.
Viral marketing
To say that something has gone viral on the internet means that it has become highly popular through people sharing it. For example, Star Wars Kid, a short video of some lad pretending to be a Jedi and waving around a lightsaber, went viral where viewers, finding it hilarious, posted it to other internet users (who might also find it funny). It spread explosively when it reached a critical mass of viewers telling others about it. Virulence refers to this pattern of spread among internet phenomena as it mimics the spread of biological viruses among a population of victims.
To reach that number of people with a sales message, with that little cost, is a holy grail of marketing: viral marketing. Hotmail is regarded as being an early example of exploiting viral dynamics of social networks for marketing purposes. Attached to any message sent from a Hotmail account was an invitation for the recipient to get their own free Hotmail account. If and when they did sign up and start posting messages, then they too would be spreading the marketing message. The popularity of Hotmail went viral.
Viral is also the mantra of internet marketeers. However, as Zarella says, this is a “unicorn and rainbows” nonsense, on the ground that they have not a clue how to go about it except to put something out there and hope that it does go viral. Most deliberate attempts seem like forced memes, which backfires on their intent.
Viral marketing has some similarities to multi-level marketing in that they both are mediated on social connections thereby spreading their influence exponentially. The distinction is that virals are associated with the internet and are more about the propagation of a message then they are about human interaction.
A framework example of the real-memetik of sales
While cliology is about understanding and using the dynamics of virulent messages across social networks, viral and MLM are a couple of examples of the phenomena where which cliology can be applied to accelerating the message’s spread. On the basis that such marketing techniques, whether users are aware of it or not, are based on spreading memes for commercial purposes, then cliology, as a method of systematically engineering more capable memes, can very much improve the goals of marketing. Considering marketing from a real-memetic and cliological framework perspective will give insight into how the messages can be given a wider reach and impact. Some of the MLM jargon and principles will need explaining and then translating into their cliological/memetic counterparts.
We can claim that all products and services and solutions, and indeed the vast majority of the customer’s problems, are a constituent of human culture and therefore memetic. It is a safe claim as really much of what we have done since coming down from the trees is cultural and a product of evolving information and techniques. The idea of having a lawn is a meme, the grass may grow by itself, but worrying about that the neighbours think it is getting too long is cultural, so too then is the idea of cutting the grass neatly, and the solution of a lawnmower is a technical development and therefore another product of culture. The entirety of trading, commerce, economics, sales and so on are examples of real-memetic that have existed in the real world and have operated well before the inception of the internet. Economics and trade are important supporting structures for society, without which there would be a collapse. The point then is that, if viewing economics in a memetic light has a contribution to make, then it is worth considering. A global memetic theory of economics is somewhat grandiose and abstract, but at the coal-face level of sales and marketing, it becomes possible to see a clear audience for practical applications.
MLM interaction on top of direct interaction
So to reiterate the basic principles of sales and marketing described above and translate them into real-memetic terms: a customer has a situational problem, a scarcity of something they need and a comparative surplus of a fungible resource such as a currency, and they are willing to exchange it with a vendor who has a surplus of the resource the customer needs and who, in their situation values the currency more. In a competitive market, then the vendor must get their message across to their target customers.
The whole process is awash with memes; let’s disassemble some of it into those framework terms. A fuller treatment is given in the [framework examples] but a simplified version, with less jargon, will be given here.
According to Dawkins, most memes have been staring us in the face all along, hiding in plain view. Sales are one example where its memetic code might not be immediately apparent owing to our familiarity with it; we just think of it as sales and not as memes. The deeper memetics of direct sales is covered elsewhere owing to the subtleties of their encoding. Here though, the more blatant example of MLM memes can be spelt out.
One way of thinking about a meme, a contagious unit of information or instruction leading to action, is that of comprising of two, what have been labelled in the frameworks as, noams. A noam is half a meme. While a noam is a bit like a meme, and may actually be communicable, it is not necessarily so, and for the purpose of analytical scope, the communicable aspect is downplayed. The capacity for a noam to spread could well be there, but, so as to focus on the directly behavioural properties we are interested in, the communicability is simply filtered out thereby bringing action into better focus. Were we to want to consider any communicability, then we would consider a memetic perspective. Whether looking from a memetic or noamic perspective is more of a matter of what features we want to apprehend. When considering the distinction between the two perspectives, it is useful to consider a noam as being half a meme.
The noamic perspective is essentially about direct behaviour, it is very much akin to the stimulus-response model of behaviourism. It is interested in the behaviour of the individual rather than the pattern of spread of behaviour among a population. When we make that shift in scope from individual to populational then we shift from a noamic to memetic perspective. A meme can be thought of, conversely, as two noams. One of them is concerned with the frontline engagement, or direct response behaviour at the scope of the individual in relation to some presenting contextual situation. A second behavioural factor is introduced, in shifting from individual to populational scope, which is about transmitting some behaviour to others. This second factor is also a noam, but rather than being about doing a behaviour, it is about spreading a behaviour. The first noam, that of response, therefore, has had added to it, a second noam, that of transmission. Together these two noams make that response communicable and therefore can be seen as a meme.
For the purpose of a direct sales example, we can view sales behaviour of the vendor as being the noam of an individual (or organisation) whereby selling is a direct behavioural response to the presence of a customer. Of course, the buying behaviour of the customer can also be examined in these terms, but let’s focus on the seller for now. Sales behaviour is at the scope of the individual, hence is a frontline engagement noam: engaging with the customer. When moving onto MLM, then the scope moves into the populational. That is, salespeople are still selling, but in addition, they are recruiting a downline. They are acting on their sales skills but also acting on a second set of skills, those of recruiting. So, there is a frontline engagement noam of sales and a so-called provident engagement noam of recruitment. These two noams, when put together, give the communicable meme of MLM, which takes us into a populational scope of analysis. Cliology then becomes an appropriate tool for thinking about and developing MLM systems of selling.
Any noam is essentially a behavioural response to a stimulus, although the framework goes into much more detail of how this operates. The MLM meme can be split into its two noams of sales and recruitment (called phi and psi) as expressed in the following simplified contingencies:
- see a potential customer -> sell them something
- see a potential downline -> recruit them
It should be clear that the first expression is applicable to conventional direct selling, and with the addition of the second, that makes for an MLM. The second noam here is the essential distinction for a viral schema: one that spreads throughout a population.
Cliological analysis of MLM
So what? how do we use this additional analytical tool in our examination of MLM?
The two factors for an MLM above are essential if one were missing then either it would be just direct selling or a Ponzi scheme. A balance then is required to generate sales and to spread the scheme. In terms of Cliology (particularly containment theory, which will be discussed in a future page), the recursive scheme is a carrier and product sales side is the payload. Containment theory looks at what kind of things something can contain and provides a taxonomy. It covers things like real shipping containers, biological containers such as a seed, and social blueprints that contain the information for social organisation. The terminology for such an analysis remains to be firmly established and will be given a deeper treatment elsewhere, but for now, the general principles will suffice.
A sycamore seed, for example, contains the information for building a sycamore tree. It also contains the information for using that tree to build further seeds, which include an airborne vehicle for delivery (a spinning jenny). Hence, it is a type of container, one that is capable of indirectly building structures like itself. An MLM scheme is also of that type of container but uses memetic rather than genetic information. An MLM scheme then contains information for generating direct sales (the payload) and information for building a downline (the carrier), which is self-referential. The distributors are acting on a set of “how-to” style procedures (or instructs) which are imparted through training, manuals, observation and so on. Of course, such instructions are more like guidelines and hints, rather than absolute rules that must be robotically adhered to. The distributors, like any other sales force, are given instruction on direct action, the actual sales process that takes place with the customer and involves such things like listening skills, as well as product knowledge. The second set of instructions given concern replicative action, that is, passing on the scheme through guidance for recruiting a downline. These correspond, in the cliological frameworks to what are called the phi and psi noams of an MLM meme, whereby the phi noam is about how to sell and the psi noam is about how to recruit. An existing distributor, enacting the psi noam of recruitment in the presence of an interested candidate downline, would invite them to a series of events that would expose that prospect to both phi and psi noam instructs. In other words, the newly recruited distributor would receive both sales and recruitment training enabling them both to sell the product and to recruit their own downline. Hence, being composed of both phi and psi noams, of both direct action (sales) and replicative action (recruitment) is what makes MLM a meme: a sales system that is recursively viral.
Here, we can examine these two sets of skills by breaking them down into main noamic properties (the three points on the inverted triangle): iota, kappa and nu. Of course, both distributor and prospect are acting on their knowledge, but the MLM training process is focused on the distributor’s skills and it is the distributor’s perspective that will be examined here.
- The iota property is what the distributor experiences, the context in which it becomes appropriate to enact a skill or a triggering condition for sales activity. information from the environment as presented by a potential customer or downline to the distributor
- The kappa property is the potential behaviour of the distributor, the set of interactive skills to select from, which would be contextually appropriate to the sales situation they are engaged in.
- The nu property is what is important to the distributor.
For the distributor then, these three properties can be seen in both the direct action of sales (phi) and the replicative action of recruitment (psi):
- phi – the direct sales noam (common to most sales encounters)
- iota: the presence of a prospective customer, buying signs, objections, questions, body language
- kappa: skills of the salesperson involved in a sales interaction – product knowledge, listening, questioning and answering, the ability to spot buying signs, handle objections, negotiation skills, curtesy, able to talk the customer’s language, have access to sales literature.
- nu: the values of the salesperson – pride in their work and job satisfaction, the thrill of the close, remuneration, social interaction, paying their bills, buying luxuries, personal aspirations.
- iota: the presence of a prospective customer, buying signs, objections, questions, body language
- psi – the recruitment noam (peculiar to MLM)
- iota: information from a prospective downline, expressing the need to meet values (eg. extra money), showing interest in the plan, other communication features.
- kappa: ability to elicit values and link them to the scheme, to know the scheme and introduce it gently, to funnel the prospect through the recruitment path, to train their downline in both sales and recruitment skills.
- nu: these are similar to those values involved in direct sales, but MLM schools often offer methods to help downlines “build their dream” such as visualising their aspirations, so as to keep the distributors motivated.
- iota: information from a prospective downline, expressing the need to meet values (eg. extra money), showing interest in the plan, other communication features.
From this basic analysis, is apparent that the skills involved in replicative action are a layer on top of those involved in direct sales action. It provides a model of what properties allow for a sales system to go viral. With this model, it may be possible to fabricate a direct sales system into one that exhibits viral traits or improve the effectiveness of an existing MLM. There are many further considerations which are beyond the scope of this rudimentary examination, which are currently being researched. Properties like “indexed addressing” and “foreshadowing aquisition” (as working titles) are presently being modelled as they seem to be implicated in MLM like processes of memetic transmission – these will be documented as their actions become better know.
The real purpose of the current analysis though is to tease out the general properties of such a viral system and compare those with other viral system such as religion or political ideology. The purpose of cliology over and above study is that of influence, of engineering. Understanding how viral ideas operate, such as those employed in MLM, could lead to applying viralisation, or vectorological, approaches to the propagation of other forms of idea.