I spent two months as a marketing intern at Amway, the world's largest direct selling company both by revenue and distributor network.
It is rather strange that whenever one mentions FMCG, we think of traditional retail formats and never direct selling.
Direct Selling is emerging rapidly as a non-store retail format in India in a significant way over the years which enables the companies to market their products and services into consumer’s hands directly. It provides an excellent platform to work independently to build a business with low start up and overhead costs.
Direct Selling has contributed significantly to the socio-economic development of the nation in regards with generating self-employment opportunities, source of earning supplementary income, encouraging entrepreneurship, empowering women, imparting skill through various training programmes and encouraging growth of MSMEs sector.
India’s macro-economic outlook has been stabilizing and lead economic indicators are gathering pace on account of several reforms introduced by the Government. However, with an improvement in the overall sentiments in the economy, Direct Selling Entities have not been able to register notable growth scenario as stakeholders were struggling with concerns like regulatory bottlenecks, absence of defined law or act, fraudulent activities impacting confidence of genuine stakeholders and consumers and declining demand scenario for the Direct Selling products in 2015-16.
The gross sales19 by the Direct Selling Industry stands at INR 83,085 million in 2015-16 as against INR 79,583 million in 2014-15, INR 74,722 million in 2013-14 and INR 71,641 million in 2012-13. The Direct Selling Industry has registered a growth rate of 4.4% in 2015-16 as compared 6.5% in 2014-15. During 2015-16, the growth sentiments of Direct Selling industry has declined on various factors such as lack of proper regulatory framework, lengthy product approvals, occurrence of fraudulent activities impacting the confidence of not only stakeholders but also consumers, slowdown in demand in the economy, stricter registration, among others. Going ahead, most of the respondents felt that economic reforms undertaken by the Government are highly commendable and would lead to desired outcomes in the coming times. The Direct Selling Entities are extremely hopeful on Government’s support in recuperating business sentiments in the economy particularly for Direct Selling.
It was a fun challenge to design campaigns for an audience that is not just the consumer of the products but also the ones who sell it further.
My mentor was very supportive and had me meet all functions as I started my internship. The format of direct selling/Multi Level Marketing is a little difficult to grasp at first, because there arent too many industries/corporations following the format.
The direct selling business is extremely people-dependent, therefore, the span of control with the organization is limited to the network of distributors.
Since India has one of the largest populations in the world, the direct selling business can be seen as a viable option for not only entrepreneurship but also self-employment.