How Much to Spend on Prizes
When selling the Mary Kay opportunity to potential recruits, we hear about how wonderful and luxurious the prizes are. How women get big prizes “just for doing my job!!!!” But the truth is that it takes ordering hundreds (or more often thousands) of dollars of inventory to get the prizes. (Remember the prizes aren’t tied at all to actually selling anything. They’re tied to how much you ORDER from Mary Kay.)
When we call them out on the dollar store trinkets that are awarded, we get called petty and unrealistic. They say that (of course) a lot of money can’t be spent on the prizes and they have to be in proportion to the amount of commission the director earns on the consultant’s. order. Sure. Of course you have to keep in mind what you’re being paid, so you know how much to spend on the prize.
But I bet you didn’t realize just how little is spent on these prizes. It’s embarrassing and insulting. Take a look.
Visit the
Kuchy Coo has a whole line of Seminar jewelry (https://kuchycoo.com/collections/celebration-collection) and all the display items for their initial selection show up as “MK”. Guess we know who and what the products are aimed at.
Correct me if I’m wrong — I think the owner/founder of Kuchy Coo is a director or the sister/daughter of a director. I recall a direct tie to MK.
Not only that, it’s owned by Denise Kucharski’s own daughter!
THere was a message board thread about it back in 2023
https://www.pinktruth.com/board/thread-11076.html?highlight=kuchy
Kuchy Koo is not an Official MK Approved Vendor ™ or affiliated with MK in any way.
A $300 wholesale order should lead to a $300 margin for the consultant, if sold at full MSRP (twice wholesale). If a $2 trinket is enough to get the attention of a consultant who just netted $300, I’d say this is brilliant. But it is much more likely the consultant is unable to sell enough, and at a sufficient margin, to even make back the $300 she spent on the order, in which case the trinket may distract her from the reality that her little “business” is operating at a loss.
Spending $300 to get $2 back is just plain silly. But apparently it works! If she paid for the purchase on her Discover card, she’d get at least $3 back. Spending $300 on something you don’t need just to get $3 back is just as irrational as ording in MK to get a cheap trinket or an honorary title. But here we are!
It does work. It worked on me for years. My self worth was trash. I was “filling my cup” through my “Mary Kay business.” The brilliant part was how concealed the entire facade was. I never really realized that MK was using me to build their business – I thought I was using MK to grow myself. What a scam.
Hence the power of targeted marketing! I’ve heard it said that a woman will pay 50 cents for a $1 item she does not need, while a man will pay $2 for a $1 item he really wants.
I mean no offense, by the way, as I remain amazed at the enduring effectiveness of the MLM “pitch”. If reworded to accurately describe what is actually going on, few would participate up front. But the lotto and casinos also generate huge profits off the overly optimistic. I have long believed that it takes significant levels of overoptimism to participate in MLM or regular gambling.
If you filled a room with 1000 seasoned MLM reps, and told them that research shows only 4 of them will turn a profit, my guess is nearly everyone in the room will believe they have an above average chance to be one of those 4. That’s how powerful the MLM message is to those vulnerable to overoptimism.
On the other hand, if you take a room filled with 1000 randomly chosen folks and had a raffle where they knew only 4 will win, my guess is each of those 4 winners are likely to be very surprised they won, and the losers will not be at all surprised they did not win.
Amway has mastered the art of filtering out those who have normal levels of optimism, while making their pitch irresistible to the chronically overoptmistic (with lots of FOMO thrown in). Amway emphasizes things that appeal to couples to keep them in. Mary Kay keeps folks in longer than they would otherwise stay by appealing to things specific to more feminine sensibilities.
I have deep compassion for those taken in by MLM tactics, but deep disdain for the perps knowingly manipulating the vunlerable.
That’s because MK makes sure to give particpants the impression that they have the power to seize that elusive profit from others all through the effort of their own and skew the “playing field” in their favour. They know someone’s bound to lose, but they think that it’s the same way as losing a contest, not losing a gamble.
Well said. The spin makes it all seem okay, because it is couched as harmless and good for all. Meanwhilhe, it is exploitative as hell. A true “wolf in sheep’s clothing” scenario.
People aren’t rational when they think they’re getting something for nothing, MLM or not. There’s a reason why so many online stores offer “free shipping with $50 purchase!!!” because they KNOW people won’t pay $8.99 shipping on a $25 shirt, but will gladly buy another $25 shirt just to get free shipping.
I mean, my cheapskate aunt once returned a case of soda to a store because she’d found it $.50 cheaper somewhere else, even though she probably spent more than four bits on gas driving from place to place.
So those numbers are quite telling. You only have a handful of 160 consultants that buy $600 a month? You have to encourage the other 150 to order $300? And we all KNOW that those consultants aren’t even selling most of that stuff.
Oh and I went to Sam Moon for the first time in years and it gave me heebee jeebees flashing back to how cool we all thought that stuff was. https://sammoon.com/