Knowledge-Oriented Technologies & Network Marketing Direct
Selling Organizations (NMDSO)
Some Preliminary Insights into the Nature and the Goals of Shared Knowledge
Carolina Guerini and Eliana Alessandra Minelli
Dipartimento di Gestione integrata d’impresa, Università Carlo Cattaneo – LIUC, Corso Matteotti 22, Castellanza, Italy
Keywords: Business Models, Knowledge Artifact, Knowledge Sharing in Network Marketing Direct Selling
Organization.
Abstract: The work extends the sales and organization literature by analyzing the nature and the goals of knowledge
sharing within networkers’ downlines in Network Marketing Direct Selling Organizations (NMDSO). The
main results of the research, based on a qualitative methodology and referred to Lyoness network in Italy,
acknowledge the relevance of knowledge sharing & creation via digital technology, distinguish the nature of
knowledge sharing and identify the main goals.
1 INTRODUCTION
A recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers
International Limited (PwC, 2014) describes the
Orange World one of three emerging
organizational models- as networks of autonomous,
specialized operations. The orange company model
lays the foundation for its success on operational
flexibility, lean staffing, collaborative partnerships
and minimal fixed costs. This kind of organization
makes extensive use of technology to run the
business, coordinate a largely external workforce
and support its relationships with third parties. PwC
consultants show how the adoption of disruptive
technologies increases speed and favours employee
recruitment. Moreover, technology itself “keeps
these networks together, often on a task-by-task
basis, with social media heightening the connectivity
upon which the Orange world depends” (PwC,
2014).
Some local academic contributors underline long
since that enterprise and distribution models -such as
direct selling network marketing companies
(NMDSO) represent (network) organizations
coordinating large amounts of autonomous sales
force. They underline that in NMDSO people have
come to realize that they can enjoy more flexibility
and varied challenges by working independently,
supported by knowledge sharing. In fact, networkers
base their careers on the collaboration with the up-
lines, and benefit in various ways from the support
given by the company itself. As such, NMDSO
represents an (old) example of the present and future
Orange organization, and probably one of the most
interesting research objectives where the connection
of autonomous salespersons generates knowledge
sharing and creation, thus enabling performance and
success (Guerini, 2003; Guerini, 2013; Gross, 2008).
More specifically, network marketing is largely
based on personal interaction and embedded
knowledge, whereas technology offers the means to
enable and support knowledge-related activities
(Cabitza and Locoro, 2014).
On the basis of the described features NMDSO
and especially the web-enabled type of collaboration
within downlines can be analysed with the aim to
find out the nature of the interchange, the goals and
preferred applications. Due to the lack of literature
on this peculiar kind of organization, a possible
research path includes a preliminary research of
exploratory nature, with the aim of verifying,
NMDSOs’ membership in the Orange world, and the
nature and goals of knowledge sharing and creation
within downlines.
2 BACKGROUND
Though academic literature includes a huge number
of publications referred to the impact of technology
Guerini, C. and Minelli, E.
Knowledge-Oriented Technologies & Network Marketing Direct Selling Organizations (NMDSO) - Some Preliminary Insights into the Nature and the Goals of Shared Knowledge.
DOI: 10.5220/0006081303010306
In Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2016) - Volume 3: KMIS, pages 301-306
ISBN: 978-989-758-203-5
Copyright
c
2016 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
301
on sales activities and performance, none of these
studies directly refers to NMDSO. At the same time,
there are no publications that explicitly refers to the
issue of knowledge oriented technologies, and their
different capability in supporting the different core
and peripheral activities of direct sales (for a review
of the main contributions, see (Groza , et al., 2012) ).
Network marketers and their downlines,
represent also a peculiar example where the analysis
of the technology-mediated relation between
salespeople and customers and the analysis of the
intra-organizational aspects merge, as networkers
and dowlines components represent both customers
and distributors of the products.
A recent survey (Guerini and Minelli,
forthcoming 2017) aims at acquiring knowledge
about the digital support used and developed by
Italian networkers. It directly addresses DiDIY that
is an activity for the creation, modification or
maintenance of objects or services in the digital
domain, which develops a mindset as well (Mari,
2014). Based on the hypo-thesis of a potential
reshape of the networker’s role due to the impact of
DiDY, the above mentioned research will also
investigate how coordination and control
mechanisms are going to change within NMDSO
and networker’s downlines as a conse-quence of
digital knowledge sharing and creation.
The cited survey is a part of a research program.
Prior to the launch of a survey, intended to acquire
knowledge on the use of digital technologies by
networkers and to identify DiDYers, the same
research project addressed the issue of knowledge
sharing and creation, thus verifying the nature and
the objectives of knowledge sharing within network
marketers communities. This paper is illustrates the
results obtained in the first research phase.
3 METHODOLOGY AND
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The importance of informal networks or communi-
ties of practice emerged in the Nineties. By way of
definition, Wenger et al. (Wenger , et al., 2002) have
defined a community of practice as «a group of
people informally bound together by shared
expertise and passion for a joint enterprise». While
communities of practice are pervasive in society and
organisations, more recently organisations have
recognised the central role that these communities
play in managing knowledge.
Starting from the observation of virtual
communities of practice comprised of networker
marketers - highly frequent on social media such as
FB, YouTube and Twitter in Italy- this work extends
the sales and organization literature by moving
beyond salespeople’s role as knowledge gatherers to
their role as knowledge sharers with the staff
belonging to the personal downline. Following
Kaplan and Haenlein (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010),
we define social media as “a group of Internet-based
applications that build on the ideological and
technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow
the creation and exchange of User Generated
Content” (p. 61).
Frequent interactions and communication
exchanges with networker’s downlines also promote
new knowledge and this is “recreated in the
interaction within communities of practice, that is in
the message exchanges of their members and in the
free flows of content and narratives that the KITAs
host and help accumulate” (Cabitza and Locoro,
2014).
Because of the poor literature on this topic, the
issue of knowledge sharing in the virtual communi-
ties of networkers was addressed with an exploratory
research, intended to analyse the nature and the
goals of knowledge sharing within downlines.
Two focus groups (Liamputtong, 2011) were
organized in July 2016, involving eight networkers
each, with the aim of analysing that situated
knowledge artifact, not yet investigated so far.
Table 1: Main activities of the participants in the focus
groups.
Which is your main
activity?
First focus
group
Second focus
group
Only/mainly network
Marketing
4
5
Mainly other
activities
4
3
Both were composed of homogeneous salespeople in
terms of career path (all having achieved remarkable
steps in the network career path), whereas gender
and age varied, as per the universe of network
marketers in Italy and worldwide.
Table 2: Experience of the participants in the focus
groups.
How long have you
been in practice?
First focus
group
Second focus
group
Less than 3 years
3
2
Between 3-5 years
2
3
More than 5
3
3
KITA 2016 - 2nd International Workshop on the design, development and use of Knowledge IT Artifacts in professional communities and
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Table 3: Composition by gender of the focus groups.
Gender
First focus
group
Second focus
group
Male
5
4
Female
3
4
Table 4: Composition by age of the focus groups.
Age
First focus
group
Second focus
group
18-30
2
1
31-50
4
5
Over 50
2
2
All networkers worked for Lyoness, they came
from different Italian towns, knew each other and
took part comfortably in the focus groups.
The objectives of the two focus groups were: a)
to verify the (perceived) importance of virtual
knowledge sharing and creation within networkers
downlines; b) to classify the nature of knowledge
sharing and /or creation within those types of
communities; c) to pinpoint the main benefits
obtained thanks to technology in a typical high touch
activity, i.e. previously based on personal
interaction.
The organization of the second focus group
aimed at confirming the results collected during the
first one and allowed a more immediate
categorization of the answers and comments given.
4 RESEARCH RESULTS AND
DISCUSSION
As far as the findings are concerned, both groups
underlined first of all - the engagement in
knowledge sharing/creating of networkers. As such
NMDSO marketing firms can be definitely
considered learning organizations (Guerini, 2013;
Nonaka, et al., 2006; Argyris and Schon, 1978) and
knowledge sharing is a fundamental activity of every
networker engaged in continuous learning, via
frequent interactions with his up-line and its
downline, and with the firm.
At the same time, in the case of network
marketing activities, this seems far more important
than in pure direct selling activities. Networkers
confirm the extensive use of technology to run the
various core activities, coordinate workforce and
support its relationships with third parties and
prospects. Networkers also affirm they use different
applications depending on the type of relationships,
clearly distinguishing between their collaboration
with the company, or with the downlines. Though
there was not full agreement (60%), most of them
stated that nowadays digital technology keeps
networks together, with social media heightening the
connectivity. The latter capability is strictly reduced
to intra-downline relations, whereas it doesn’t fit for
horizontal relationships between different network-
kers teams, and within vertical relationships with the
headquarter.
The main findings about the nature of the
knowledge shared in social media groups suggest a
distinction between the sharing of information about
the activity and the ideological considerations.
Downlines share, on a daily basis, huge
quantities of information about the company, its
marketing and compensation plan, the role of the
team or persons involved, as well as their status and
upgrade, sharing also verbal information, links
and/or photos (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010)).
Information technology is increasingly used by
personnel engaged in network marketing activities
also as a means to encourage collective action in
support of the advancement of an ideology or idea
(Oh, et al., 2013). In this sense the analysed types of
organizations rely heavily on information, whereas
community-building, and action-oriented messages,
using the taxonomy of Lovejoy and Saxton (Lovejoy
and Saxton, 2012) seems to merge in a ‘ideology-
sharing’ category.
For them, this is considered part of the sales
activity, frequently communicated (by the NMDSO
as well) much more as a typical way of life rather
than as an alternative distribution model for goods
and services. In this case the downlines interact
frequently to share contributions by bestseller
Authors in the field of network marketing, videos
and posts that lay the foundation of the network
marketing ideology. The ideology-sharing concrete-
ly occurs, on the basis of the narration done during
the focus groups, by researching, analysing and
diffusing interesting contributions or by generating
new contents by commenting them, and posting the
results in all the social networks in which they are
active (FB personal page and group, Youtube,
personal site if existing).
Referring to the goals that motivate the sharing
of information, economic benefits are mostly cited.
Being compensation plans in network marketing
activities structured so as to reward collaboration
between people, sharing appears a rational, utility
maximizing behaviour. Furthermore, there are signs
of both positive and negative influences of economic
Knowledge-Oriented Technologies & Network Marketing Direct Selling Organizations (NMDSO) - Some Preliminary Insights into the
Nature and the Goals of Shared Knowledge
303
incentives on sharing behaviour (Davenport and
Prusak, 1998; Bock , et al., 2005; Kankanhalli, et al.,
2005) as networkers underline, during the
conversations within the focus groups, that
“economic benefits are the reason for avoiding
knowledge sharing with different downlines”
(horizontal relationships). This behaviour has a
potential negative impact on the network as a whole
in terms of coordination and success.
It is interesting to underline that discussion
converged, as the focus group components stressed,
that knowledge sharing is considered by owners also
as a way of ‘helping people’, thus solving them
‘problems’ and favouring a ‘better future of all
people involved’. More clearly, networkers add to
economic benefits personal gratification as an
important by-product of knowledge sharing,
collaboration and networking. In this case, the
interaction via FB and Whatsup allows networkers
to keep in contact continuously with recently
engaged workforce and favour their motivation,
training and the appraisal of the ideology.
Moreover, in the context of network marketing,
sharing through social networks serves as an
incentive for saving economic resources (Luchs, et
al., 2011). In network marketing activities the
organization of events is frequent and common (and
will persist in future). At the events all downline
components participate actively by accompanying
new members, potential customers and future
networkers. Nevertheless, if the knowledge sharing
occurs via social networks, instead of vis-à-vis, the
speediness and the advantage of cost-saving become
the main reasons for non-personal interaction.
At the same time, both focus groups confirm that
a fundamental dimension of virtual interactions via
social networks is represented by the enjoyment
derived from the activity itself. Social networks
appear to be ‘a way of handling life’. Being the
contents of information shared multimedia, and
thanks to the variety of stand-alone and built-in
social media services currently available, networkers
underline the fact that ‘entertainment’ and ‘joy’ are
part of their lives, and ‘entertainment an important
reason for interacting via social networks’. On the
basis of what networkers mention during the focus
groups, conversation mediated by technology
include every aspect of the networkers’ lives. Photos
and videos regarding their private sphere are part of
the information sharing. Nevertheless, frequent
interchange includes posts, videos, texts dealing
about aspects of our ‘existence as human beings’
that encourage, through emotional arousal, also the
likelihood of sharing news (Berger, 2011).
Enjoyment has been regarded as an important
factor in sharing-related activities, such as
information system use (van der Heijden, 2004), and
information sharing on the Internet (Nov, 2007;
Nov, et al., 2010). A study on the continued use of
social networking services established that
enjoyment is a primary factor, followed by the
number of peers and usefulness (Lin and Lu, 2011).
Social networking services and similar service
design used elsewhere can be seen to especially
promote relatedness (see (Hamari and Koivisto,
2015), and e.g., (Deci and Ryan, 1985; Ryan and
Deci, 2000) on relatedness), which is a major
determinant for intrinsically motivated use such as
enjoyment.
Finally, some questions were addressed to the
impact of knowledge sharing in network marketing
activities fostered by social media. Within
downlines, knowledge sharing has been defined as
the main source of knowledge, its impact judged as
very high, its value defined as ‘incomparable’;
with the words of the interviewees: “without
interaction, collaboration and knowledge sharing,
network marketing wouldn’t be network marketing”;
“social media modify the way we share knowledge
and information by rendering that all much easier,
faster and more agreeable”; “the continuity allowed
by cheap technology in interaction and collaboration
makes it possible to reach 1 billion clients
worldwide in a limited number of years, which is
our network’s goal.”
5 CONCLUSIONS AND
LIMITATIONS
This study has several limitations. They include
issues related to: (a) sampling, (b) possible resear-
cher influence, and (c) participants’ level of honesty
and accuracy. The study was also limited to one
network and networkers came all from one country.
Nevertheless, we contributed to the elimination
of the general lack of context regarding knowledge
sharing in social media, as indicated by Kümpel et
al, (Kümpel, et al., 2015) in reference to qualitative
and situation-related research about news sharing.
Respondents had the opportunity to further develop
their thoughts and provide reasons for their
individual and collective sharing behavior.
The qualitative approach was suitable and
appropriate to the study for the richness of the
information obtained allowing researchers to gain
preliminary insights into the research problems and
to develop propositions to be validated
KITA 2016 - 2nd International Workshop on the design, development and use of Knowledge IT Artifacts in professional communities and
aggregations. Knowledge Artifacts as resources in the maker and DIY communities
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quantitatively (Creswell, 2005). As clarified in the
Introduction, the research project is comprised of a
series of steps. The results of the preliminary focus
groups encourage the launch of a survey intended to
acquire knowledge on the use of digital technologies
by networkers and identify DiDYers. This study
offers some preliminary insights on the relation
between knowledge-oriented technologies and
NMDSO by analysing the nature and the objectives
of the web-enabled collaboration.
The ‘social web’ (Stroulia, 2013)offers the means of
socializing the advantages of the network marketing
model, considered primarily a ‘way of life’, in which
autonomy, joy and amusement, but also altruism ,
generosity and personal gratification pay a great
role. Though the means of the social web, network
marketers benefit from cost-reduction, increased
efficiency and personal gratification as well.
At the same time, the study seems to offers also
some preliminary insights into the knowledge
artefactconstruct as well, and can be useful both to
inform the design and to evaluate the impact of
knowledge-oriented technologies in the communities
of practice that adopt them and adapt them to their
ever-evolving bodies of knowledge.
In details, knowledge artifacts appear to be
embedded in culture: in this case the network
marketing culture, being the research results highly
homogenous.
Besides networkers found some difficulties in
defining clearly the correlation between applicative
used/objectives and outcome. A further effort by the
Authors will be, thus, directed to the investigation of
the knowledge oriented platforms that best support
knowledge sharing and creation in NMDSO,
depending on the complexity of their aims.
Nevertheless, it is apparent that the above mentioned
social media represent the main application used so
far for virtual knowledge sharing and creation.
Networker marketers have also proved to be
knowledge sharing agents highly active within their
personal and professional network.
Thus, the general recommendation to focus more
on theory building could be combined with the
suggestion to subdivide theory building about
knowledge exchange via social media, not only
considering organizations and individuals but also
persona/professional networks.
Thirdly, this culture-bound, context related
research results deductively sustain the call for a theory
based on a multidisciplinary approach that could
positively be impacted from advances in information
technology, economics, marketing, organization and
psychology.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article has been developed under the DiDIY
project funded from the European Union’s Horizon
2020 research and innovation programme under
grant agreement No 644344.
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