Marketing of Belief: Intertextual Construction of Network Marketers' identities

Abstract

Network marketing, as an enterprise `using' friendship to promote products, has been notorious for its exploitative use of interpersonal meaning. This study examines how identities are textually transgressed and manipulated in network marketing discourse, a nexus of business, interpersonal, and institutional relationships. Using Halliday's systemic-functional framework, a comparison of five director's messages, three from network marketing organizations, one from an ordinary business enterprise, and one from a voluntary social organization shows that network marketing texts are constructed intertextually and dialogically in sophisticated ways. It is argued that network marketing organizations (NMOs) do not simply sell their products; they also attempt to reconstruct their sales agents' identities to the advantage of their business operations.