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The Strength of Weak Ties: Getting Outside Your Warm Circle

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MLM is known for its characteristic sharing of products and/or business opportunities with friends and family—close ties. New distributors typically want to share and are most comfortable sharing a product or opportunity with people they know. These are the people in their lives that are most likely to be supportive of their new venture. The power of close ties has been demonstrated by research in both China (Luk et al, 1999) and Taiwan (Lan, 2002). Direct selling has been proven to do well in close knit cultures. On the other hand, distributors often worry about or ignore contacting their weak ties. However, in a research study of both current and former distributors in Taiwan, Lan (2002) found that those who had succeeded in MLM in Taiwan had developed large organizations from weak ties. This struck me as a wake-up call to think differently about relationship marketing.

We have a warm market of friends and family, or “strong ties.” In other words, a strong tie is someone you spend lots of time with and are similar to. We have what could be called a lukewarm market or “weak ties. ”A weak tie is someone you know, but are not likely to spend much time with. Then last, we have a cold market of total strangers.

Strong ties

Our friends and family—strong ties–are easy to talk to about our passions because they know and love us and also feel obligated to help us out.  However, one problem with using only strong ties to expand one’s network is that everyone you are strongly connected to is also likely connected to the other people in your warm circle.  This results in the drawback of all of you sponsoring and selling to the same group of people.

Another problem with strong tie relationships that may prevent you from arriving at the top is they are a lot of work! By nature, they are more time consuming than relationships with acquaintances, and may require daily or at least weekly time and energy to maintain.

Combining personal relationships and business is not new, nor is it unique to MLM. Most of us have purchased products because of a friend or family member’s recommendation. However, the emotional strain of combining personal and business relationships can be too much for some people. Over time, this strain can negatively impact personal relationships. Your friends and family may start hiding from you.

Weak ties

Sociologist Mark Granovetter (1973) developed the concept of weak ties to explain how social structures are built from interpersonal relationships. He did an interesting study of 284 people who had just changed jobs. He found that 55.6% found their new job through someone who they spoke with occasionally–more than once a year, but less than twice a week.Only 16.7% of the new jobs were found through close ties. Granovetter’s study concluded that weak ties potentially bridge us to a new circle of people with different knowledge and resources.

Simply put, the weak ties in our lives lead to new people. A weak tie could be an old college roommate, former co-worker, or employer. For some, these weak ties are even easier to approach than strong ties because they are just that –weak ties. We sometimes fear talking to our friends and relatives for fear they will feel that we are exploiting our relationship with them.

The distributors who work their way up in a company often do it through the strength of weak ties. They apply this valuable concept in their MLM business, as well as learn to deal with the emotional strength and drain that is inevitable in a relationship business. For example, a top distributor once told me that he started his recruitment with acquaintances that already made a good salary, not those that needed to make an income. He stated that those people who already were in the workforce or were business owners themselves were connected to a lot of people through weak ties. They already knew the power of connections in the lukewarm market.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that you need to look beyond your immediate warm circle in order to develop your MLM business. Making new friends out of acquaintances in an effort to build your business could be the key to success. In MLM, there really is strength in weak ties!


Granovetter, M.S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties.American Journal of Sociology.78(6). 1360-1380.

Lan, P.C. (2002).Networking Capitalism:Network construction and Control Effects in Direct Selling.The Sociological Review.43(2).165-184.

Luk, S.T.K., Fullgrabe, L., & Lee, S.C.Y. (1999).Managing Direct Selling Activities in China:A Cultural Explanation.Journal of Business Research 45(3). 257

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