Direct selling: everybody gains

Direct selling: everybody gains


Tom Peters, the management guru, lives in Montana on a salubrious ranch and runs his office in California with the help of a GSM telephone, modems, internet, computers, e-mail and faxes. He visits his organisation from time to time, just to put faces to names and assess body language.

For the rest, Peters fishes for trout as he weaves his books or seminars in his head or on a lap-top, rides horses, plays with his children, has candle-lit dinners with his wife, all in a surfeit of quality time that he has created for himself. Quixotic as this sounds, the man must be doing something right if you look at the kind of bucks he makes.

What has this got to do with direct selling? Well, here’s another idea-think of those New Zealand bungee jumpers. Sure, it takes courage to leap off bridges into the abyss. It takes the jumper upside down to within scraping distance of doom, jerking him practically half way up again. It’s the elasticity one is referring to, and the excitement.

Direct selling has these two virtues. Freedom and privacy, even as you are one digital connection away from help, should you need it. And, elasticity. You can work as much or as little as you like. You can choose the size, heft and ingredients of your sandwich, determine your pay packet, find ways to pat yourself on the back or kick yourself in the shins.

From the customer end, there’s an element of luxury involved in the shop coming home to sell to you. Rich people who bought jewels and furs had this sort of service. Now the Americans have found ways to democratise it. Even in India, direct marketing from the glossy mailers to the VPP post parcel is making rapid inroads. Catalogues are being advertised. There are televised exhortations to buy direct. There are price advantages, lower overheads. Keen, entrepreneurial, self-employed people. Internet banking is here too. What lies beyond the next bend in the Ganga?

Home offices, Home PCs certainly. These are already entrenched. Direct marketing is growing in relevance in this new world of informed choice.

In India, we are used to vendors and tradesmen. Traditionally they have brought fruit and vegetables, pickles and fish, crabs and sweet meats and offered to refill lumpy cotton mattresses. But the mattresses all turned into Dunlopillo and Coir and the victuals are better a short drive away. What remains an attractive proposition is the catering to one’s wants rather than one’s needs, brought, as of yore, to our doorsteps, but with a difference, a high-tech spin.

Probably the biggest of the direct mail successes internationally has 2.5 million distributors spread over 70 countries pumping up a turnover in excess of 6 billion US dollars. These are people from a variety of professional backgrounds, different economic and educational levels and a multiplicity of cultures.

So what does it mean to the customer? Home delivery really. The neighbourhood Kebab Walla isn’t a patch on the home delivered pizza. That is why one tips the pizza man and argues with the Kebab Walla, unkindly casting aspersions on the meat he uses.

Direct marketing, tele-banking, 24 hour access, all singing “customer is king”. It is going to be a long-term phenomenon, growing wings with time.

The good part is that anything that provides some comfort to all will find its place in the sun. Manufacturers are happy that their products are taken off their premises; distributors are earning margins without having to pay for inventory; the company, like the hen mother, is supplying bon mots and know-how, scrutinising products and developing networks. And the customer is getting pampered.

Welcome to the world of making your own sandwich and liking it too.

(624 words)

By Gautam Mukerji

First published in THE PIONEER www.dailypioneer.com on December 6th, 1997 in their Second Opinion column