Emotional Manipulation in Mary Kay
The debate rages on between the “pro” and “anti” sides of the debate about Mary Kay Cosmetics.
On one side, we have women who claim Mary Kay has a wonderful opportunity that has enriched many women. Everything in Mary Kay is optional, and only lazy losers who didn’t work hard enough and couldn’t say no to the occasional unethical director failed.
On the other side, you have women who have the ability to apply logic and reason to the situation They realize that since 99% of women lose money in MLMs, this isn’t a wonderful opportunity. They know that Mary Kay has put millions of women in debt.
They understand that manipulation and dishonesty is rampant in Mary Kay, and that women are pushed to their limits and skillfully guilted and coerced by their corrupt uplines. They see that almost no one succeeds in Mary Kay for obvious reasons: It’s a recruiting scheme that relies on the constant recruitment of new blood, who bring with it fresh credit cards, dreams of staying at home with their children, and the eagerness that allows inventory frontloading.
But you say that the women themselves are to blame for being taken advantage of by the millions of millions of Mary Kay recruiters who regularly misrepresent the “opportunity” in order to get recruits? You say they should have said “NO” to anything they weren’t comfortable with? You say they should realize that sales tactics were used on them, but the whole world is for sale and they should have said “NO”.
The problem is that the “sales tactics” employed by Mary Kay consultants and directors are dirty. They’re not just any old sales tactic. They’re crafted and taught in a way that will put most leverage on the potential recruit. Guilt and shame are powerful motivators, particularly when they relate to your family. No tactic seems off limits to Mary Kay recruiters.
An analogy of a car dealership is sometimes used to by the pro-Mary Kay crowd. They say sales tactics are used there too, and consumers just have to say “no” if they don’t want to buy a car. Plain and simple.
But let me show you how Mary Kay is different by applying a few common lines to the car dealer theory. These lines and techniques are used in recruiting, and when trying to coerce consultants to purchase unneeded product or do other things in pursuit of the Mary Kay dream that they wouldn’t ordinarily do.
Use your children as your reason, not your excuse: Imagine test-driving a car, looking thoroughly at the numbers, and deciding that the car isn’t right for your family. It’s too expensive, uses too much gas, and just isn’t practical for your family.
But the car salesman tells you to do it for your children. You tell him that your children deserve a financially stable family, and that an expensive purchase like this won’t meet that goal. And he tells you that you’re just using your children as an excuse. Don’t they deserve a nice car like this? Sure, you’ll have to sacrifice, but one day they’ll thank you. You can’t keep using them as an excuse to not get out there are look good in that car! They’ll resent you for that. They’d want you to make the most of this opportunity to own a wonderful car like this.
You see, it’s clear that these manipulative statements have no place in selling a car. Using your children as a guilt tool? Making it seem as if your children deserve to be proud of a car? Making you feel as if you’re just making excuses for not buying this car that you want.
Yet these are exactly the type of statements that Mary Kay directors use to get you to “do” Mary Kay, or attend more events, or try to move up the “career ladder,” or order more products for the sake of your “team.”
Even after proclaiming that God comes first, family comes second, and career comes third, the Mary Kay consultant is told to set her family’s needs and desires aside. To do it “for them,” even though you’ve already said that what’s best for them doesn’t include Mary Kay.
Don’t listen to negative people: Imagine sitting at the car dealership and telling the salesman that the car really isn’t for you, and that your husband agrees. And he says, “Your husband is just trying to sabotage you. He doesn’t want you to feel good about yourself. He’s unsupportive. He knows how good you’d look in this car and how wonderful you’d feel each time you drove it. But he wants to keep you down.”
You squirm a little at the salesman’s statements and assure him that it’s a joint decision and that you and your husband talked it over and agreed. The salesman says, “You shouldn’t listen to negative people. All they want to do is take away your dreams. They don’t know what you might be able to accomplish if you drove this car. You owe it to yourself to give it a try and not let these other people influence you.”
“This is your life and your car. Stop talking to the people who only want to ruin it for you. Oh sure, they sound like they’re trying to help by talking about economical alternatives to this car that might work better for your family. But what do they know? They’re just negative people who don’t want to see others succeed. You can show them what you’re made of by getting this car!”
The silliness of such statements is clear when you think about it in terms of buying a car. And the silliness of a Mary Kay director applying it to doing Mary Kay or trying to move up in Mary Kay is no different.
How dare she insult your relationship with your husband, and how dare she say (not imply, but say directly, and often) that your husband is trying to keep you down and doesn’t want to see you succeed. That is not only disrespectful, it is despicable to use such things to try to get someone to buy into the Mary Kay dream.
No doesn’t mean no. It just means she needs more information: Mary Kay women never want to take no for an answer, and they’re taught religiously that they should not ever accept your “no.” No is just a request for more information.
Imagine a car salesman taking every “no” he receives and pretending it’s a request for more information.
“Are you interested in test driving this Mercedes?”
“No, I’m looking for a more economical car.”
“Well let me show you all the wonderful features the Mercedes has. It’s really a bargain when you consider what you’re getting.”
“No, it’s really not right for my family. I’m looking for something a bit different.”
“Really? Well what if I gave you a free coffee mug for test driving the Mercedes? I’d really like your opinion on it.”
“No, I really need to devote my efforts to looking for a car that’s really right for my family.”
“Oh come on. My sales manager challenged me to find five people today who could give me their opinion on the Mercedes. It’s just a short test drive.”
“Really, I can’t. I want to look at some other cars.”
“Let me tell you about some of the features of the Mercedes, of which I’m sure you’re unaware. How can you make a decision about the car when you really don’t have all the facts?”
You can see how ridiculous this gets as it goes on, and no real professional uses these types of tactics. Sure, there’s usually some attempt to overcome some objections, but not to the point of silly where you keep pushing something on someone who keeps saying no.
But in Mary Kay, this is okay. Keep wearing her down until she says yes… and hopefully signs up to do Mary Kay.
But just remember that someday the pro-Mary Kay crowd will likely tell you, “You just should have said no if you didn’t want to do it. No one held a gun to your head.”
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Great points.
Also, when you buy or lease a car and make your payments on time, it helps your credit rating. Maxing out one credit card after another to buy inventory ruins it.
If you buy a car, once it’s paid off, you have a valuable asset. You can sell it, trade it in, donate it to charity, or keep it. Cars are something people actually want. I have a 2017 Crosstrek and the dealership is constantly after me to trade it in because they can’t keep enough good used cars in stock. Nobody wants MK makeup.
The dealership pays the salespeople a base salary in addition to commissions and bonuses. A coworker of mine bought a car from the dealership about 6 months before I got mine. He referred me and got $100 Visa gift card and the salesperson got a bonus because a referral means she was doing her job right. She didn’t need upsell me because she was getting paid anyway, and so she could sell me the car I wanted and get a guaranteed commission rather risk being told “kiss my grits, I’m off to the Ford dealership across town.”
She was also very knowledgeable about the features of the various models and the boring technical stuff, which was impressive because on top of the various Subarus the same dealership sold Kia and Nissan as well so all the sales staff had to be ready to sell any car at any time. Contrast with Mary Kay, where all the training is about recruitment, because that’s the part that actually makes money. IBCs aren’t even allowed to apply product to their own customers because they aren’t licensed.
And because this is me, I got lost on the test drive. In Forty Fort, PA, which I’m sure enorth will get a good laugh out of. Forty Fort is a small town that’s very hard to get lost in, but I have a special talent ::sigh::
“enorth will get a good laugh out of”
I did! 🙂
Once again, these scripts fail in the Internet age. When I bought my last car, Dodge Caravan, I had specific needs. It had to carry over five adults on a semi-regular basis, I needed a decent cargo space, colour wasn’t an issue, mileage was TBC regarding the age of the vehicle.
So I got on my laptop and looked up car marques and what they had in mini-vans, I could do virtual tours of each type of van. I could look the pros and cons of each type.
I asked my friends, the parents of my children’s friends, for garage owner for recommendations of second hand car dealerships.
I looked up their inventories on the web. I made a decision on what cars I wanted to look at and made an appointment via the message app.
While I had selected two vans to test drive, another had come in and the salesperson had booked that for me, too. That was the van I ended up with, substantially lower mileage for not much more dosh.
At all stages dealing with the salespeople, my bank and the accounting department, I was treated as an intelligent independent adult who was capable of making her own decisions, not a mindless ninny who had to be cajoled or bullied into buying something I didn’t want in the first place.
This, I think, is the key point. It’s why MLMs in general are getting so much more pushback recently. Gone are the days of uninformed housewives, dependent only on their husbands’ income and information directly from people who stand to benefit from a bad decision. Gone (mostly) are the days of husbands who “babysit” their own children and are incapable of ironing their own shirts or washing a dish. Women make up half the workforce and are gaining ground in C-suites and almost all historically male-driven industries. We control significantly more than half of all purchasing power in the developed world.
And yet, Mary Kay’s scripts have not changed. They’re geared to ignorant women who are at the mercy of their husbands for approval of all decisions. They play on the fact that men are supposedly threatened by successful women and only want stay at home wives. They presume that women don’t have access to outside information, and if they do, that information must necessarily be negative and trying to tear them down. They assume that women don’t know their own mind and must be “trained.” They assume that society doesn’t want strong, independent women.
All of these assumptions have been on the decline since the 1960s. And the internet (with the exception of Reddit–that sinkhole where the incels and neckbeards of the internet go to die–put the final nail in the coffin of uninformed, airheaded women that must be guided to make the right decision because she doesn’t know any better. Mary Kay likes to hold itself up as “empowering women,” “enriching women’s lives,” “the original feminism” but it’s all utter bullshit. They want women barefoot and pregnant, unable to access the internet or any other source of non-Mary Kay information, far more than any man I’ve ever met in real life.
Reddit? https://www.reddit.com/r/antiMLM/ has 800k members!
That sub is amazing! Some of the other subs? Not so much, lol!
There’s also a lot of YouTube anti-MLM creators out there with 75k+ subscribers. There’s pages of anti-MLM on Face Book. The information is out there, MKKorpse can’t stuff the genie back into the bottle.
There are some YouTube creators who have done great Mary Kay videos. DeeCee used to be in Mary Kay, and The Clown Town has a series called Mary Kay Mean Girls.
Everything that Tracy wrote with this thrown in:
The person with all the manipulative lines isn’t just any car salesman, she own all the cars available on the lot, a full store lot. Instead of selling one of her own cars to you, she wants you to order 100+ cars from Corporate, and pay them.
She also knows you have property, one block away, where you will start your own dealership – just like hers. Plus, she wants you to see if any of your friends would be interested in the opportunity to also open a dealership. All these can be in the same town. This way, they can all attend weekly meetings together and train to recruit even more dealerships.
As Tracy explained, it’s manipulative silliness; and it’s the silliness that Mary Kay is actually a product (car) sales business for the affiliate.
They might try to sell you one car, but that’s only a lead-in with the ultimate goal to get others to open a dealership too. There’s no profit in reselling cars because the dealership that signed that dealer up, one block in the other direction, is constantly selling at cost to make production. Well, this is to the few people who felt bad for her, and who refused to open their own dealership.
Amazing how stupid it all sounds when you take off the crown, sash, and scriptures.
Meanwhile, Mary Kay Corp. has 50 people in one town who have purchased 100+ cars directly from them. No wonder they are debt free.
Mary Kay often uses analogies that don’t work if you just think a little.
*No business makes a profit in the beginning! (You don’t own your own business in Mary Kay. You can’t sell it or advertise, for example).
*Also, a car is not supposed to be an income-producing activity. (Mary Kay presents the inventory purchase as a way to make money for your children, not take it away from them, which is highly unethical). Selling a person a car is selling them a car. Not the lie that they will earn a fortune after buying such car. Yes, both salespeople can lie about what they are selling, but MK is particularly sneaky about being able to blame the customer for the product not producing the promised results.
“No doesn’t mean no” is precisely how rape happens.
Mary Kay quote: “You can do anything in the world that you want to do if you want it badly enough and are willing to pay the price.” Yes, indeed. The price (for MK) is your family, marriage, friends, career, self-esteem, financial security and integrity.
I worked in mattress retail for years. People HATE shopping for a mattress, usually because they don’t know much about them and are afraid to ask for risk of being “sold” to. I get it. I found the best approach was to say something like “if you give me an idea of your budget for this purchase, I can help you find the right one, and I will answer any questions you have”. That approach was generally effective. Sometimes they would inquire about the more expensive ones, and sometimes they’d end up choosing one above their originally stated budget, but only because they sold themselves on it rather than were pressured to buy it. It’s not a difficult concept: truly listen to your customer.
That Mercedes example above really does sound ridiculous and turns a completely deaf ear to what the customer wants. In Mary Kay, if a new recruit states they only have the budget to buy the starter kit, they will get all kinds of suggestions on how they can “increase” their budget (loans, credit cards, etc) and be guilted into buying more.
“No doesn’t mean no.” Said every sleazy lounge lizard everywhere. MLMs teach you to ignore boundaries and disrespect others.
This article reminds me of a training video that came with my starter kit when I signed up for MK in 1992. A director named Ronni D’Esposito exemplified the “no doesn’t mean no” concept when she tried to get a customer to book a follow-up appointment after a skin care class. The customer very politely said no numerous times, but Ronni was having none of it. She harangued this poor woman until she finally agreed to set up a “tentative” appointment. I was quite honestly shocked. Ronni was being extremely rude to her customer & had I been the customer, I would have been tempted to either smack her or tell her to take a long walk off a short pier. What I would have done is tell her that I was cancelling the order I just placed & simply walk away. This didn’t sit well with several directors I talked to. They agreed that Ronni was way too aggressive & I heard that the video was pulled not too long thereafter.
And yet they wring their hands and bemoan “women these days” and their lack of integrity when they get ghosted. Puh—leeze. 🙄