Selling Friends

Last week I went along to a private party in Bangkok that was unlike anything I’ve been to. It was held at a new swanky night club and was hosted by the local head of Herbal Life.

Now for those who don’t know what Herbal Life is – and I didn’t before I went – it’s a global personal-selling organisation like Amway. The wikipedia description is “an independent distributor selling personal care and nutritional products”. And depending on who you talk to it can either be a dangerous pyramid selling operation (outlawed in some countries) or an entrepreneurial enterprise offering anyone who works hard enough with a pathway to wealth and success.

Every month this guy invites about 1,000 people to this all expenses paid extravaganza – complete with free booze, celebrities and even a car giveaway. But far from being a wanker, this guy’s apparently very hard working and also incredibly nice to everyone who he knows.
But then as my mate Bo reminded me, being nice is his job.

At the moment I’m writing a book about the amount of commercial messages we all deal with, and the need to fight hard to create what I call neutral time - personal time to do what’s important for you.

One of the chapters is on the idea of ‘selling friends’. That is, as we become more skeptical of marketing and our media habits are more fragmented, friendship has started to become a renewed marketing battleground. And for a company nowadays finding it harder to sell through traditional media, what better way to sell then through someone your customers know and trust – your friends.

It certainly makes sense to the Amways or Herbal Life’s of the world. And they are not alone. Most of the clients I work for are working hard to take advantage of the social networks within their customers’ lives. Whether it’s a friend get friend promotion, a bonus offer for providing your mate’s email or setting up a product profile on Facebook – they’re all doing it. And many believe it makes perfect selling sense.

But, on a personal (and professional) level, it makes very little sense to me.

I mean what do you really think when a friend or family member tries to sell you an Amway product? Or your email address gets given away by a friend for a promotion they entered? And how about when you get added by a Myspace ‘friend’ who just wants sell you something?

For me it’s a complete turn off – both of the friend and the product. In my world, and I’m betting in yours too, our friends are not always ‘nice’. They’re often loud, smell bad and late – but they do have give us something we need. They provide a degree of trust and honesty; and least enough to tell it like it is.

In end, they are the antithesis of the sell.

If the rise in email, social networks and the online marketing that goes with it has taught me anything, it’s that friendships now have never being easier to create or maintain. A few key strokes or touch of a button is all it can take. But the flip side to that is that we could be creating an environment when people can turn off just as easily.

In an age where friendship becomes so replaceable, when you trade them in for embedded sales people, then I guess you might as well except your life has become a 24x7 supermarket where you are the commodity and the till is always ringing

I once sent a friend’s email to a company in exchange for a free t-shirt, and he was quite rightly pissed off. ‘Was the t-shirt worth it?’ he asked in an email. Fair question. And when I sat at that Bangkok party the other night and realised that half the people invited were friends of members who purpose were there to experience the glorious opportunities of the Herbal Life, I wonder what those friends thought? I wonder, in the end, whether they felt a little used and abused? A little less like a friend.

I think one of the things that defines a friendship these days is how well you respect their neutral time – their non-commercial space. This is not a question of what friends are more real than others, we all have varying level of intimacy with different people. It is simply an acceptance that now more than ever we need space away from the 24/7 sell, to be with people who provide us with a bit of a break from the infotainment bombardment.

So in all our work with social networks and blogs and communities - we look to add some value and make a brand useful rather than use their space and their relationships to sell ourselves.

Because as a real person, that's all I care about. I mean really... fuck Amway, forget the networking party and hook up with your flatulent friends. The only thing you’ll get out of it is a piece of sanity, but that’s gotta be worth something.