Monavie article
Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2011 3:49 am
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/cougars/53 ... t.html.csp
The once-surging Utah-based seller of a blend of fruit juices, MonaVie LLC, is rebranding itself to the world as "MonaVie Community Commerce: The No. 1 Business Opportunity."
The company hopes the phrase better represents what multilevel marketing — also called direct sales or network sales — in which company revenue comes from selling products to independent distributors. Distributors, in turn, are told they can earn anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to fabulous riches through retail sales and commissions from building "downlines" of distributors beneath them.
But behind the new slogan, which suggests a kind of intimate, we’re-all-in-this-together, friends-and-family business model, still lies a stark statistical reality. An analysis of the average earnings data provided by MonaVie in 2009, when it last supplied distributors with comprehensive numbers, reveals that 98.5 percent of distributors who earned commissions averaged just $129 a month despite the pitches to the contrary.