Director’s Message at the Establishment of Direct Selling Research Center

                                                                                                                                            September 1998

Direct Selling/Multilevel Marketing is a very popular marketing channel nowadays, however the bad impression from previous “Rat Club” has caused public to be questioning about the rightful of direct selling/multi-level marketing conducts. After its establishment in 1992, Fair Trade Commission of Executive Yuan has established management guidelines to regulate multi-level marketing behaviors.

Continuous research in Direct Selling will obviously become a major activity. It not only contributes a lot in academic but also is a worthy referential value for governmental organization. Moreover, direct selling companies, direct selling distributors and general public can obtain important concepts and methods from the objective and decent direct selling research results.

In overseas, people could discover that the World Federation of Direct Selling Association (WFDSA) and the Direct Selling Education Foundation (DSEF) in Washington D.C. is working on promotion of direct selling education and whereas the Federation of European Direct Selling Association (FEDSA) in Brussels, Belgium is working on integration and strengthen of direct selling business. Domestically, the ROC Direct Selling Association, the Chinese Direct Selling Market Development Association and the Network Marketing Magazine are all devoted in the promotion of direct selling.

With the advocate of Prof. Der-Fa Robert Chen at Department of Business Management, we could finally establish Direct Selling Research Center (DSRC), approved by the Ministry of Education, within the College of Management at National Sun Yat-Sen University. In addition to the consolidation of interested professors in direct selling research, DSRC could instituted academic position within direct selling research and become a professional unit that answers inquiries and undertakes their research projects from governmental units and direct selling business.

The objective of Direct Selling Research Center is to advance the academic research and to propagate proper concepts of direct selling. Major Responsibilities are as follows:

  一.    Devote to direct selling related research.

  二.    Advocate appropriate direct selling management concepts.

  三.    Offer direct selling related educational training programs.

  四.   Exchange ideas with other direct selling research scholars worldwide.

  五.    Enhance national academic reputation in direct selling research.

The financial resources of Direct Selling Research Center are from:

        一.   Undertake related research projects.

        二.   Offer direct selling educational training programs.

        三.   Sponsor of direct selling academic and practice conferences.

        四.   Obtain donations from various enterprises.  

The current plan of DSRC includes the establishment of a small library to place every thesis collected nationally and globally; to set up a DSRC Website to place every important message online; to organize the Third Academic Symposium on Direct Selling (November 14 & 28, 1998 at Kaohsiung and Taipei respectively) for providing a communication channel for enterprises, government and academic; to offer direct selling courses in the MBA program to increase students’ interest in direct selling research.

In the future, we plan to conduct direct selling seminars annually and extend it globally. We wish that we could constantly receive financial support from government and industry and involve more on related research and promotion. Looking forward to its acceptance by the public. We wish to establish DSRC as the origin of academic research on direct selling.