Ms Joyce Waweru chose a career in marketing. Fredrick Onyango
Few people would drop from a banking career at the Central Bank of Kenya to move into multi-level marketing popularly known as network marketing. But Joyce Waweru did.
Today, besides taking a commanding lead in the industry, she is also the director of Change Speak limited, a company that is involved in mentoring young people in career choice.
An established marketer and distributor at Tiens Health Product Kenya Limited, a locally operating Chinese company specialising in wellness and personal care products, Waweru ventured into marketing by chance. She was looking for a more “interesting” career outside banking.
“I went into marketing school to enhance the talent I had with ease. Marketing has become my career and my life. I am good at it no doubt. Talking and showing a customer a product he already needs to a point he makes a purchase is my job,” she said.
Today, Ms Waweru boasts of 15,000 marketers she has brought into the marketing chain for the company products across the East Africa region, out of whose sales volume part of the commission is paid to her in addition to incomes from her personal sales.
Dream come true
Her radiant smile is enough evidence that hers is a dream come true. It is a reflection of a discovered fulfilling career, thanks to a marketer at Tiens Limited who she met on one evening while out for coffee and introduced her to the multi-level marketing model.
It is a career she is keen to build, if her more than Sh400,000 worth personal library of books and video clips detailing marketing and personal development concepts is anything to go by.
Within a period of close to a decade that she has worked for Tiens, she says she and her network of marketers have been able to bring in business worth over a million dollars.
And this business is not only sourced from Kenya but for four years now she has constantly travelled to Ethiopia to sell the wellness products. Other countries that constitute her markets are Uganda, Tanzania and the recently established South Sudan. Her mission is to do away with the notion that marketing is for jobless people; efforts she has been able to achieve going by her past performance. But looking back at Kenya, it is not a situation that brings smiles to her as her fat paycheque would do.
“Despite Kenya having the best tax laws that favour incomes from commissions, there has not been a corresponding positive perception of marketing. The numbers of jobless people keep soaring whereas there are opportunities in marketing lying all over waiting to be discovered,” she said.
Commissions
Commissions are taxed less than salaried incomes. It is an opportunity that has raised incomes for Ms Waweru and others in that line as world over most such taxes rarely exceed 5 percent of the total income from commissions.
“Young people in Kenya are not as aggressive marketers as their peers in the region,” she said. In her view, such countries as Sudan and Ethiopia have young people who are keen to build careers on a home-based working model that is gaining popularity in the developed world where the race for independent entrepreneurial skills is at its peak. It is a similar model that is applied in multi-level marketing as all one needs is a brain, communication skills, a network of clients and the products on sale.
Unlike any other business that would call for huge capital and most probably attract rent expenses, all she required was Sh1,500. This was the registration fees to join the company’s list of distributors.
Several factors drove Ms Waweru into choosing a career in marketing. First, the flexible working schedules that have been made possible by network marketing which is purely based on appointments.
Then, the fact that it is an almost monetary free investment coupled with the fact that it is less threatened by technology as has been the case in other careers where most human roles have been replaced by computer systems.
“Whenever you have a new product, you will most definitely require marketing for it especially where the market is competitive,” she added. In search of cheap options to marketing, most companies have turned to multi-level marketing. It is a model that has proven quite successful judging by the number of companies that are expanding their branches and rely on this type of marketing. Locally, companies popular for using this model have been those in the wellness and personal care products such as GNLD, recently launched BF Suma and beauty products company Oriflame among many others.
With a keen eye for various cultural settings, political and economic regulations present in various countries, Ms Waweru has no doubt that is the recipe for a successful approach in marketing across countries.
Expansion
In Tanzania for instance, the impact of socialism as introduced by the country’s first president is still felt in social settings, she views it as an opportunity to introduce the network marketing as socialism makes networking easier.
In Sudan, where she ventured most recently, she says that patiently learning the social and cultural systems has come in handy to design the right approach to marketing in this region.
“How liberal you are in your home country is not the same way that others are. You should take time to study and respect other people’s ways of life if you want them to be your customers,” she said. With corporate Kenya eyeing South Sudan for expansion plans, Ms Waweru sees extended opportunities for herself and others who will develop the right marketing approaches to suit this new frontier.
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