Network marketing – A tool of feed-forward control in the age of transparency

This article attempts to address some of the growing concerns of customers and consumers of products and services in this digital age. Customers are no more impressed with costly and sophisticated (for the producer!) distribution systems in an attempt to reach the product promptly with SPEED. Resistance to such costly formats is evident from growing customer apathy and dejection. Today the customer wants a cost effective and convincing solution to his problems and need satisfaction products. Marketing controls – an essential element of marketing management for measuring effectiveness of marketing programs, traditionally, have been based on feedback from market. Basically there is nothing wrong in this approach except that customer perceptions take so much time to beat the beaurocracy of organizational set up to reach the decision makers in the corporate echelons! Meanwhile the competition would have gone ahead in introducing an altogether new product that meets the customer expectations and has raised his level of expectancy that the company finds itself outsmarted in the market place! Feed forward marketing controls instead of traditional feedback controls is the solution to the problem in the present marketing environment where transparency, product feel, demonstrations and an opportunity to test and verify product claims instantly are important. Network marketing facilitates this.