Question: Beloved ascended masters, could you comment on MLM, multi-level marketing? Is it an honest way to make money if it is products of high quality?
Answer from Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2023 Easter Webinar.
Well, you cannot give an absolute or clear answer to this because it is individual. There are, of course, different multi-level marketing companies out there that have different philosophies. But what you would need for this to be an honest form would be transparency. In other words, how much money are the people at the very top making? The fact is that you have two basic ways to sell products. Well, today you have three basic ways. The traditional one was through a store. Otherwise, there is online and then there is multi-level marketing where instead of having a physical store, you have people who sell directly to other people. Either way, there is, of course, a profit being made. And even in traditional marketing where you have a manufacturer that makes money on a product, then you have a distributor, then you have a retail chain, perhaps an individual retail store. The price that you pay in the store is, of course, much larger than the actual cost of producing the product.
The question is always, how much is profit of what the consumer pays? How much is profit and where does it go? It is not dishonest to have various levels of the manufacturing and distribution process that all make money on a product. But it would be dishonest even in traditional ways when there is an extraordinary amount of profit that is funneled upwards towards a very small group of people such as an individual owner or the shareholders of a company. The question to always ask is how much direct profit is there of people who are actually not doing any work in the process of producing or distributing the product? And it is, of course, the same you can ask in online marketing and you certainly can ask it of multi-level marketing.
And the fact is that many multi-level marketing schemes have been basically pyramid schemes. You have the idea that you can make money on selling this product when you are at the end of the chain, you are the one selling directly to another person. But if you can get other people below you in the chain to also sell the product you are making money off of the products they are selling too. In other words. profit is funneled upwards in the chain and the question is how many people are at the top and how much money are they making?
And in many multi-level marketing schemes you see that just a few people on the top are making an extraordinary amount of profit out of other people’s labor but they are basically doing nothing. They just need to be in that position and make the situation work. And you know how it is when you create a pyramid scheme that is a direct pyramid scheme without selling products but through investment it usually runs out of steam after a while and that is what happens to many multi-level marketing companies. There are some that are exceptions that have existed for a longer period of time and that is because they have a better distribution of profit.
These are things you can consider. You can also look at what is the cost of the product at the consumer level and if this was not sold through multi-level marketing but was sold in a traditional store what would the cost be? The multi-level marketing often claims that it can sell this product cheaper because you do not have all of these middlemen from distributors to retail stores. But it often is not true. It actually in many cases costs more for the consumer than it would cost in a store. What is it then that makes a multi-level marketing company seem attractive? It is that they are selling the dream that you can make money. What people are buying is not a product, it is the dream of making money. And that is usually not a survivable business model because it eventually runs out of steam when people realize that the dream was just a dream and that it is only the people at the very top that will make a lot of money where people at lower levels cannot make money no matter how hard they work.
Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels