다단계 판매 시장 및 판매형 소비자에 대한 연구

Abstract

Today’s consumers are participated in the distribution of marketing as a seller and share the profits with companies. One of the most well-known examples is multi-level sales whose market has constantly increased for past few years. This study aimed to examine the current status of multi-level sales and its overall social perspectives. For this, a network text analysis was conducted on newspaper articles and reports of the past 3 years and keywords related to multi-level sales which appear as main social issues were deduced. In addition, in order to investigate the meaning of these keywords, an empirical survey was conducted with 335 consumers who work as multi-level salesmen. First, we conducted a network text analysis on 1,804 media reports on multi-level sales and searched mainly for keywords in relation to multi-level sales. Fairness, income gap, credibility, vulnerable classes/college students, and illegal activities showed strong central connection. Through this, it revealed that the social discussions would be needed about fair distribution of profits and there were various damages caused by the fraudulent multi-level sales that are constantly occurring in the society. This shows that there are wide-spread negative social perceptions about multi-level sales such as low level of reliability and massive damage to consumers. Second, an empirical survey was conducted with 335 consumers from 42 multi-level companies. Consumer’s perceptions about the overall consumer service of multi-level were positive. Meanwhile many consumers reported the most important factors of the multi-level support allowance were ‘fairness’ and ‘profitability’- which are the aims of information disclosure policy implemented by the Korean government. However the results showed that consumers were not satisfied with the government’s information policy because of the contents of information, therefore policy improvement would be strongly required. The findings through the two different analysis derive the two common topics related to multi-level sales, ‘the negative social perceptions’ and ‘the importance of fairness of support allowances’. This study suggests that improvement of the current information disclosure policy is required for better social recognition and consumers’ welfare in multi-level sales market.