Network Marketing Lifestyles: August/September 2001
The Next Trillion
WHY NETWORK MARKETING IS POISED TO DRIVE THE NEXT MAJOR ECONOMIC POWERHOUSE - AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL ZANE PILZER
By JOHN MILTON FOGG
An earthquake is coming. In fact, its preliminary tremors have already begun. The economic foundations are perceptibly trembling; hairline cracks are spidering out along the plaster walls of our domestic spending habits; neatly framed pictures of current fiscal reality are starting to tumble off those walls. Looks like it’s gonna be a good 8.0 on the economic Richter scale— or higher—and only one man seems to have ears keen enough to hear it coming.
Every generation, among the thousands of brilliant and merely-bright social commentators, the human race produces one or two visionaries whose stunning insights burst the bounds of their own specialist's expertise and cut across all disciplines. We have our Benjamin Franklins, our Buckminster Fullers--and Paul Zane Pilzer, the man who sizes up seismic shifts in our economy.
Pilzer is quick to assert that he has no crystal ball: it's all in the data. But the three-times New York Times best-selling author and economic advisor to two presidential administrations has an uncanny knack for assembling masses of facts and figures and seeing the forests those reams of trees represent. His penetrating insights have attracted the attention of network marketers for over a decade.
Now he's back, with a new message: We are witnessing the explosive birth of a new trillion-dollar industry, and network marketers everywhere are poised to be the vanguard of that explosion.
NML: That was over a decade ago, and you've since become a household word to thinking network marketers everywhere. Obviously, your thinking hasn't stood still; what has happened in the ten years since?
PZP: I've changed my focus a good deal. Back in 1990, the opportunities still lay in physically distributing products; since 1990 we've seen a dramatic shift. In my new book, The Next Trillion, I break distribution into two functions: physical and intellectual.
Physical distribution means getting the product to the consumer--products that the consumer already knows he wants. That's Walmart: You know exactly what you want when you walk into Walmart; you go in, pick it up, and get out of the store. You don't learn about anything new there.
Intellectual distribution is where you learn about a new product or service that you didn't know existed before.
Up through 1990, the great opportunities to earn fortunes in distribution, the opportunities for the Fred Smiths, Ross Perots, and Sam Waltons were in physical distribution. Today, the great opportunities are in intellectual distribution.
NML: For example...?
PZP: The truth is, the great part of the physical distribution boom that I described in Unlimited Wealth has already come and gone; the fortunes to be made there are largely already made. The fortunes that will be made in the new millennium--at least in the first decade of the new millennium--will be more in intellectual distribution: educating consumers about products and services that will improve their lives, products, and services that they didn't already know existed.
NML: Why is that where the real opportunities are today?
PZP: Because that is precisely where the biggest bottleneck is today. There was a time when the two aspects of distribution--physical and intellectual--were commonly combined under the same roof. No longer.
If you're as old as I am, you might remember the first few times you went into a store and said to yourself, "Hey, I know more about this product than the clerk selling it!" Twenty-five years ago, that was a shock: who would think of opening a store where the clerk didn't know anything about the product?
NML: How does network marketing's way of doing that contrast with more conventional ways of marketing--through advertising and other mass channels?
PZP: Network marketing today is almost wholly intellectual distribution. When you as a network marketer discuss a product with a consumer, you don't actually hand over the product. You rely on UPS or some other delivery service to have the product shipped to your consumer.
Even more fascinating is that network marketing today is typically done person-to-person by someone who is also a user of the product. Unlike the car salesman, electronics salesman, or clothing salesperson, the network marketer is an educated, enthusiastic, experienced user of the product you're asking about.
Those companies that prosper in network marketing will focus almost entirely on intellectual distribution, teaching people about new products and services that will improve their lives. Those that really flourish will have some sort of unique or proprietary technology. And not just unique, but efficacious--better than anything else out there.
As much as we focus on the financial and lifestyle benefits of the business, the real benefit is what you can do to change a life--and the lives of all the people who are touched by that life. If you can add five, ten, fifteen years to someone's life, think of his children, think of his spouse. We're wonderfully interrelated in the world today, and when you can give someone the gift of wellness, improving the quality of that life every day and increasing the length of that life, it's a truly wonderful thing.
Make no mistake: there is a crisis, a trend of epidemic proportions going in the other direction in the rest of America. Right now, network marketing is the only force I see on the horizon that has the potential to make this kind of huge change.
_______________________
Home 