Six key insights into the future of the Direct Selling Industry
One of the things that I love the most about my work is that I’m continually exposed to new ideas, new people, new places, and new industries.
Last week I gave the opening keynote at the Direct Selling Association of Australia annual conference. The theme of the event was “Defining our Future,” so they wanted to kick off with big picture perspectives on the future of business from a leading futurist. My presentation at the conference is here.
I had never been exposed to the industry before, however in preparing for my keynote, and at the event itself where I came in for the cocktail reception the night before and stayed on for the CEO panel following my keynote, I gained a number of insights into the industry and where it stands today.
The Direct Selling industry is comprised of three major segments: personal or door-to-door sales, such as the classic Avon model; party plan, for example Tupperware; and multi-level marketing (MLM), exemplified by Amway. All of the models rely on face-to-face interaction and relationships.
The industry definitely has image issues. My general observation is that there are undoubtedly some in the industry who contribute to that perception, however any who are successful in the long-term are absolutely ethical and genuine. Distribution based on face-to-face relationships is absolutely a valid business model and economic sector.
Here are some of the things I learned or observed about direct selling:
1. Economic downturns can be great for direct selling.
What drives the industry more than anything else is the availability of talented people becoming distributors. When unemployment rises, people seek new ways to make money. The increase in motivated distributors can outweigh lower sales per individuals to create higher revenue.
It is totally INSANE that you cannot use an external keyboard on an iPhone
I love my iPhone. But it has some deep flaws. OK, so cut-and-paste will be available with the 3.0 operating system – that’s good. The lack of a video camera is annoying and strange – rumors are that the next iPhone released in the northern summer will have video capabilities.
But the thing that really gets me is that you cannot use an external keyboard on the iPhone. Unlike the other issues, there is no way you can argue this is a technical problem. Apple has deliberately crippled the Bluetooth functionality so external keyboards can’t be used.
The whole point of a smartphone is that it can be your central hub when you’re on the move, increasingly obviating the need to carry a laptop around. If the iPhone had an external keyboard, I could use it for a large proportion of my needs when I’m on the move or travelling, including email, working on documents, blogging and more. For now I have a choice of carrying a laptop, or taking a Palm and external keyboard with me in addition to the iPhone, just so I can write.
Embracing the Future: keynote speaker at Direct Selling Assocation
Tomorrow I am giving the opening keynote at the Direct Selling Association of Australia Conference 09 which is on the theme of ‘Defining our Future’.
The slides for my presentation are below. As always, these are intended to accompany my keynote, not as stand-alone slides.
The presentation includes a diverse range of examples of markets that are currently growing:
Guitars
Home renovation tools
Home gardening
Books
Cookware
Lipstick
Quality jewellery (in the case of my wife’s business www.victoriabuckley.com)
Brain fitness
Clean energy
Robots
Aged care
Mobile applications
Events (done well, in the right sectors)
I’ll write more soon about the array of growth markets that offer great opportunities at the moment.
Why GFC explains everything (to Australians)
This morning an email from a client mentioned the GFC. Earlier this week another client was talking about the GEC (which has the advantage that you can pronounce it, while GFC has to be spelled out).
When this morning I Twittered about how we have a new acronym that doesn’t need to be explained, I got some interesting responses. @ITSinsider in America said that she had heard it before from someone else in Australia. An Australian initially thought I meant Geelong Football Club, so googled it to find out.
Which gives very interesting results…
If you Google “GFC” in Australia the #3 result is a newspaper story Tough week ends in talk of ‘GFC’, dated from October last year, with four of the top 10 results referring to the planet’s economic woes, including three newspaper headlines.
If you Google “GFC” in the US, aside from a #5 entry from Wikipedia which includes various acronyms including the contemporary one, the first entry which refers to GFC in this way is at #45.
So are Australians particularly acronym-crazy? Are we in the vanguard of what will be a global trend to summarize the state of the world as GFC?
Of course the very best thing about GFC is that it is an easy explanation for everything, in three easy letters. It was all getting very complicated for a while. Now it’s simple again – yay!
Profiting from Technology Trends: Keynote at National Growth Summit
Tomorrow morning I am delivering a keynote at the National Growth Summit, looking at how fast-growing companies can tap technology trends to build growth and opportunities.
The presentation is below (usual caveats – this is not intended as a stand-alone presentation but to accompany my speech). I’ll write more about this soon, but now I must get to bed – it was a long (though fun!) day at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum today.
Why traditional conferences are dying and how unconferences and audience participation are the future of events
For many, many years I have felt that the vast majority of conferences were very poorly run, continuing to apply ancient, didactic approaches. That’s one of the reasons that a few years ago I started running events, organizing the Future of Media Summit, which annually links Sydney and San Francisco, the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum (the second annual event is on next week), Web 2.0 in Australia etc. Earlier events including what was at the time the extremely innovative Living Networks Forum in New York in 2003, using social networking technologies embedded in the event. Even though the events industry is vastly oversupplied, the majority of them are crap, so there’s ample scope for something better, as the consistent success of our events has demonstrated.
Certainly the last few years have seen the beginning of a transformation in how events are run, with in the US, Europe, and Australia (less so in Asia so far) many novel and highly interactive formats. However there is still a massive opportunity to create immense value with face-to-face events, and we’re currently looking to spin off our events business into a new company that will grow aggressively. News on that soon.
I am unusual in that a large part of my work is as a keynote speaker, speaking primarily on the future of business (including sometimes the future of events), usually within a traditional conference format. However at the same time I endeavor to create (or help my clients to implement) participatory formats that transcend the talking head syndrome.
Now the issue is getting mainstream media attention. News.com.au has released an article titled: Networking trend: the ‘unconference’, which examines the plethora of interactive events that are arising, such as unconferences, Lightning Talks, Ignite, and Pecha Kucha, and drawing on an extensive interview with me on where the space is heading.
The entire article is well worth a read. Below are excerpts of the direct quotes from me in the article.
Timewarp discovered: What daily life will be like in the year 2049
Have you ever wondered what life will be like in the year 2049?
Amazingly I seem to have stumbled across a timewarp. The blog p40y is being written every day in the year 2049, and each blog post appears daily 40 years earlier. Since the blog began on New Years Day 2049 (and 2009 via the timewarp) some fantastic insights into the future 40 years from now.
Here are a few excerpts that give a flavor for what we can expect at the end of this half-century.
Today I sat in a meeting with some people and some Claytronic replicas of other people that were unable (couldn’t be bothered?) to make the meeting in person. Now I know this is a new technology but it’s total rubbish. In theory you just pmail or gfax over some instructions to a giant programmable lump of clay sitting in one of the spare chairs and it automatically morphs into a life size 3-D, walking, talking replica of the real person.
However, it didn’t. In this instance the millions of tiny microprocessors didn’t seem to be communicating with each other correctly – or the electrostatic forces weren’t working because someone left an AiPhone™ on – and what we got instead was a giant brown talking turd. “Different day, same old talking shit” as one wit observed.
This is particularly interesting. Kil’n People by David Brin, one of my favorite science fiction books, describes a world in which people create animated clay replicas of themselves. I have also blogged about a Japanese professor who has created a doppelganger of himself – though not in clay…
DNA Hacking
Wealth Adaptation Syndrome (WAS): a defining malaise of our times and the opportunities that stem from it
I was interviewed last week on social trends in 2009 for a feature story in the Sunday Times magazine in Perth. In order to illustrate my ideas, I coined a term, Wealth Adaptation Syndrome, or WAS.
(One of the great things about the growth of Internet content and search engines is that when you invent a phrase you can check whether anyone has ever written it before. This post is the first ever appearance of the phrase ‘Wealth Adaptation Syndrome’. However note that Sudden Wealth Syndrome (a quite different phenomenon) was commonly referred to during the dot-com boom.)
Wealth Adaptation Syndrome is, quite simply, the process of adjusting to significantly different perceptions of your personal wealth. This applies quite differently depending on starting levels of wealth, but in all cases requires adjustment of not just wealth status, but also social status, and usually behaviors including spending patterns.
What business books I’m buying and reading
I just received my latest book shipment from Amazon.com – it’s a tasty pile and I thought I’d share the list in case people are interested. Friendfeed is a nice way to share my various activities, but doesn’t include book purchases, which I’d probably prefer to share on an ad-hoc basis anyway.
Below are the books, together with brief comments. In most cases I haven’t read them cover to cover yet, but I’ll offer my thoughts either through reputation or having had a browse.
The predominant themes of Enterprise 2.0 and influencer marketing are obvious. We are writing our own Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report, as well as running our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum soon, and it’s good to see what else has been written on the topic. As any regular readers of this blog will soon discover, influence will be a major theme for my companies in 2009.
Enterprise 2.0
By: Niall Cook
A succinct report-style overview of Enterprise 2.0 from an executive perspective, written by Niall Cook of PR firm Hill & Knowlton.
ENTERPRISE 2.0 IMPLEMENTATION
By: Aaron Newman, Jeremy Thomas
An extensive examination of Enterprise 2.0 implementation. It is written primarily for technical people, including some code examples, though is certainly accessible to non-technical people.
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
By: Yochai Benkler
I’ve been long overdue to get this on my bookshelf. Already a classic, it covers the political and economic implications of a networked world.
Our trend map for 2009: The vital Trends, Risks, and Red Herrings you must know
Following our extremely popular Trend Blend 2007 and Trend Blend 2008 trend maps comes…. Trend Blend 2009!
Created by Future Exploration Network’s Chief Futurist Richard Watson, also of NowandNext.com, the 2009 trend map moves on from the subway map theme of the last years to show the multi-tentacled hydra that is the year ahead.
Click on the map to download the pdf (810KB)
To pick out just a few noteworthy elements of the trend map:
CORE THEMES include:
Uncertainy
Ageing
Global Connectivity
Anxiety
Power Shift Eastwards
SUBJECT THEMES include:
SOCIETY: Search for control, enoughism
TECHNOLOGY: Simplicity, Telepresence, Gesture based computing
ECONOMY: De-leveraging, 2-speed economies, Shorter product lifecycles
ENVIRONMENT: Bio fuel backlash, Negawatts, Nuclear power
POLITICS: Virtual protests, Globalisation in retreat, Immigration backlash
BUSINESS: Networked risk, Transparency, Asset price uncertainty
FAMILY: Debt stress, Allowable luxuries, Middle class unrest
MEDIA: Flight to quality, Facebook fatigue, Skimming, Micro boredom
POSSIBLE RED HERRINGS include:
Climate change crisis
Fall of US Empire
Nuclear power
Device convergence
GLOBAL RISKS include:
Major Internet failure
Influenza pandemic
Major earthquake in economic centre
Obesity
Electricity shortages
People taking trend maps too seriously
As usual, this is released on a Creative Commons license, so feel free to play with it, adapt it, and improve it!
Wishing everyone a fabulous 2009 – be sure to take advantage of these upcoming trends!
