Building a smart international expansion strategy means looking for momentum-building markets with untapped growth potential. In 2024, that indisputably includes the Hispanic and Latino markets.

In Mexico alone, the direct selling market is projected to surge to $19.48 billion by 2028. That staggering number doesn’t include the more than 60 million Latinos living and working within the US, or the fact that direct selling is already a staple for the Latin American population, where a quarter of beauty and personal care sales take place through a direct selling relationship (compared to eight percent globally).

“Latinos in the United States represent a larger consumption market than the entire economy of nations like Italy, Canada or Russia,” shared Judith Sanchez Lopez, PM-International General Manager, Latin America. “If Latinos living in the United States were an independent country, the US Latino GDP would be the fifth largest GDP in the world, larger than the GDPs of India, the United Kingdom or France.”

There are a number of direct selling companies who have already captivated the Hispanic and Latino markets and are thriving. There are two distinct scenarios at play here: US-based companies that are dominating in Hispanic markets and foreign-based companies doing the same.

DSN 2023 Bravo Growth Award winner Princess House successfully serves this corner of the US market. Other examples include 4Life, Hy Cite, Immunotec and relative newcomer ACTIVZ. These companies are also strong in other Spanish-speaking markets.

Betterware de Mexico and Omnilife are based in Mexico and making huge strides in that market and throughout the region.

It could be tempting to assume that the same strategies and approaches that work for US customers would be a fit for the Hispanic population living within the US, or even the neighboring Latin American populations, but that assumption is a sure-fire way to fail. Ignoring the unique communication styles of each individual market is not only ineffective, it’s disrespectful. There are cultural sensitivities that should be honored; product preferences that need to be prioritized; and local talent that deserve to be elevated to leadership.

“Companies that want to be successful need to stop making Latin American countries an extension of their current market,” said Mauricio Domenzain, Immunotec Chief Executive Officer. “By that, I mean you really need to commit to the market. We can’t simply send one manager to Latin America now and then wait to see if it’s going to work or not. It’s a full commitment, not just the addition of another flag on your wall or your website. You have to truly become part of that market to understand the cultural needs.”

Copy and Paste Isn’t a Strategy

What works in the United States doesn’t automatically translate to success on a global scale. That goes for products, but it’s also a good rule to live by when it comes to communication, marketing materials and events. For companies founded in the US or who predominantly operate within the US, expanding to include Spanish-speaking consumers is not as simple as hiring a translator or relying on Google Translate. These translations are often choppy, with no regard for local idioms or speaking rhythms.

Solving for this pain point has been a game changer for brands like 4Life, who overhauled their communication process to treat Spanish as its own first language rather than relying entirely on English. The company now enlists two separate content creator teams, one who is primarily English-speaking and one who is primarily Spanish-speaking, to design materials. The end result prevents poor translations that damage credibility.

“If you go to our convention, we are 80-85 percent Hispanic,” said Brian Gill, 4Life Chief Marketing Officer. “Five years ago, out of respect, we stopped translating English to Spanish. It’s not enough to have great translators. A Hispanic whose primary language is Spanish should be the one creating our materials. It’s about empowering the affiliate to share the brand, and a poor translation is not a credible connection they are proud to share.”

Homogenous, hand-me-down resources communicate the message that international markets are inferior, less valuable and unappreciated. Conversely, when companies allocate the resources and staff necessary to maintain and develop a culturally relevant, localized brand with tools that take local language, lifestyle and history into consideration, customers and distributors take note. A successful entry into Hispanic and Latino markets is one that allows the population to embrace entrepreneurial opportunity while preserving its own cultural DNA.

“Entering the Hispanic market was not secondary or an afterthought; it was our primary thought,” said David Brown, ACTIVZ Chief Executive Officer. “Our Spanish-speaking distributors are constantly amazed that they get new products and materials first and that they weren’t translated from English. Everyone responds well to attention and responsiveness, and that’s probably the secret to our success.”

Honor Culture Past and Present

Family is a core value for the Hispanic and Latin American markets, and consumers in these demographics typically have great reverence for their parents and their tightly-knit communities. The US ethos of independent, self-made success doesn’t land the same within these cultures, so even well-intentioned corporate leaders commissioned from the company’s US headquarters could get off on the wrong foot without realizing it.

“It’s not only the language, but it’s also the culture that you need to understand,” explained Domenzain. “You need to have people on the ground—people directly from those markets—who understand and can serve that market the correct way.”

Leaders also need to consider how each new generation brings their own energy and inspiration to the foundational values of the Hispanic and Latin American cultures. From a corporate standpoint, that means being willing to adjust the speed and style of work. Omnilife addressed this generational evolution by implementing a shift from graphic design to a focus on social media, leaving behind big format printing in favor of video and digital formats and encouraging all of its departments to embrace the Gen Z style of work, which is quick to adapt to change.

“We are integrating younger generations into our corporate team, and that has helped make us relevant,” said Eduardo Ros, Omnilife Marketing Manager. “Our communications and packaging have become younger. We have received testimonies from people in Ecuador and Peru who tell us that working with second- and third-generation distributors who are younger has helped them see how best to take advantage of this opportunity and approach the business differently.”

Recognize the Uniqueness of Each Market

Each country and community has its own unique traditions and habits, and the Latin American market is no exception. There is no one-size-fits-all approach that would respectfully reach this vast audience, and it’s important to remember that there are distinctions among the adjectives often used to describe this diverse group of cultures within and outside of the US. The word Hispanic describes Spanish speakers, including those living within the US and Spain, while Latinos is reserved for those living within Latin America, including Brazil, where Portuguese is the official national language.

“Hispanics in the US are not a monolith,” Sanchez Lopez said. “They are a combination of countries, cultures, slang, levels of acculturation and generations. You need to decide who you want to target, understand what sets them apart and then ask yourself if your company is communicating and interacting in a way that respects their cultural differences and strongest drivers.”

For companies with a broad footprint across countries with similar but distinct cultures, discovering what makes each market tick is critical to securing healthy, welcomed growth among distributors and potential customers. Hy Cite, for example, courts Latinos in eight different countries, including the US and Brazil. Efficiency is incredibly important, so the company harmonizes its content, but it also takes care to modify even the smallest details to communicate that each individual market matters.

“The way we present our products changes depending on the audience,” said Paulo Moledo, Hy Cite President and Chief Executive Officer. “Our recipes used on social media, for instance, feature arepas in Colombia and tacos in Mexico. We also pay attention to our call center services. We learned the hard way that the agent accent speaking to customers from different markets is an important variable.”

Moledo also emphasizes the significance of making sure corporate expresses with actions that they value distributors’ wellbeing just as much as their earning opportunity. For Hy Cite, that means facilitating a close relationship between executives and top leaders; leaning into recognition; and designing ways for distributors and customers to voice their opinions and experiences.

“Latinos, more than most, need to feel heard,” Moledo said. “As fast as we could after the pandemic, we started having events, conventions and meetings with independent distributors, and the attendance has been outstanding. We invest more today in events than we did pre-pandemic, but the return on that personal, face-to-face touch is great.”

Operating with inclusion and respect as the highest priorities is non-negotiable. It’s imperative that companies take the extra steps to ensure the opportunity they are presenting is tailor-made for the audience receiving it, and that their presence improves the quality of life for the people who call that country home. When diversity of backgrounds and ways of doing business are treated with dignity and honor, executives who have successfully built bridges into the Latino and Hispanic cultures say there is a shared entrepreneurial spirit that transcends language barriers and countries of origin.

“It doesn’t matter what language you speak or what country you’re in, everyone is looking for the same thing,” Domenzain said. “To be a part of something bigger than yourself.”

From the November 2023 issue of Direct Selling News magazine.

The post Hispanic Market is booming first appeared on Direct Selling News.

Dixon’s background includes field training, business builder relationships, translation and interpretation, marketing, and cultural diversity and awareness. She began at 4Life as project manager in 2002 and has held positions as vice president of International Product Registration, director of Regulatory Affairs vice president of Field Development for Spanish Markets.

“Deborah’s connection with our distributors, creative communication strategies and strong work ethic are a few of the many great attributes that make her the perfect fit for this new and critical role at 4Life,” said Senior Vice President of Marketing Brian Gill.

Patterson came to 4Life in July 2018 as director of Southeast Asia. He has more than 25 years of experience in direct sales and international marketing. In his new role, his geographical responsibilities will include the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America.

“Erik is passionate, humble and well-versed in a variety of areas,” said 4Life President and CEO Danny Lee. “His leadership skills and accessibility will prove invaluable as he takes responsibility over our largest markets. This is an exciting time to share the 4Life opportunity as envisioned by David and Bianca Lisonbee more than 20 years ago.”

The post 4Life Announces New Vice Presidents first appeared on Direct Selling News.

In 2017, their sales were $316 million—enough for more than 8 million containers.

That’s more like it.

Danny Lee

But these things take time, the Lisonbees say. While they had big goals when they started their direct selling business 20 years ago, they were willing to reach them gradually if it meant they could build a solid foundation of research and attract people with a passion for their vision: to share Transfer Factor, the company’s core ingredient, with the world.

“We didn’t just take off like a shot,” David says. “We grew one person at a time.”

Bianca remembers hearing from more than one person that she and David should “find some big guns in the industry” to help them leapfrog to success. They resisted, and it paid off. Now they are big guns, at No. 51 on the 2017 Direct Selling News Global 100 list of the world’s largest direct selling companies. As Sandy, Utah-based 4Life celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, executives will leverage what they have learned over the past two decades to further develop their niche as a research-driven, immune system support company; sharpen their focus on customer acquisition; and position the company to triple its worldwide base of distributors and customers to 1 million in the next five years.

Teachable Moments

When the Lisonbees, their 4Life leadership team and thousands of distributors gather for 4Life20, the company’s international convention in April, they will celebrate company history and accomplishments—to a point. Executives say they are too focused on and excited about the future to dwell too much on the past.

“We come to this 20th anniversary with a lot to be grateful for and with great expectations,” says 4Life Vice President of Communications Calvin Jolley. “But it’s not a story that we want to look back on for long. It’s one that we want to build into the future with.”

Newly named 4Life President and CEO Danny Lee says the lessons he will carry with him as he leads the company into its next phase will be a blend of what has and hasn’t worked at 4Life and what has and hasn’t worked for the direct selling channel in general. “We have learned over the past 20 years that you can have a charismatic leader. You can have exponential growth in markets. You can have all kinds of flashpoints. But if you don’t have a great product, backed by science and research, you’re not going to last in the long term.”

Science has been at the center of 4Life’s values and operations since day one, David Lisonbee says. It even made the difference between Bianca resisting David’s startup idea and jumping on board with it.

“We come to this 20th anniversary with a lot to be grateful for and with great expectations. But it’s not a story that we want to look back on for long. It’s one that we want to build into the future with.”

—Calvin Jolley, Vice President of Communications, 4Life Research

“I was David’s hardest sell,” Bianca says, remembering how nervous she was about launching into another business. David had just left another nutraceutical company he had co-founded, and she wasn’t sure they should be entrepreneurs all over again.

But then she started reading the research on and using transfer factor—the product that had lit a fire in David—and she became its biggest cheerleader. Says David, “I felt in the deepest part of my bones we had to start this company,” to which Bianca adds, “Once I had an experience with the product, I felt the same way.”

4Life Transfer Factor, which is made up of proteins and other peptides from cow colostrum and chicken eggs with the primary purpose to balance the immune system’s natural responsiveness, has been an ingredient in the company’s most successful products. 4Life has launched and had “respectable” success with such lines as personal-care products and protein products, Lee says. “But they have never truly caught on the way we hoped. It’s a reminder that you want to stick to your core competency. We are the immune system company.”

Starting with Science

4Life Chief Scientific Officer David Vollmer, whose Ph.D. is in analytical chemistry, says his research and development team wants to capitalize on what it has already discovered about transfer factors while it taps the ingredient’s deeper potential.

4Life Corporate Office in Sandy, Utah

Twenty years ago, Vollmer says, the ingredient targeted just the immune system. Now his team of doctors, chemists and lab technicians as well as the company’s university and private laboratory research partners are seeing connections between the immune system and many other body systems. Together these systems make up the body’s microbe community, or microbiome, Vollmer explains, and the fact that they’re so interdependent has big implications for 4Life Transfer Factor and its contribution to health and wellness. “That’s what we’ve centered on lately, having a product that’s addressing the microbiome in a way no one else is doing,” he says.

A product that 4Life will unveil at its international convention in April will reflect some of this recent microbiome research. They’re keeping the product name and most of its details under wraps, but company executives will say that the 4Life Transfer Factor-based product “promotes gut microbiome wellness.”

The research and tests that 4Life has conducted on this and other products often is published in academic and scientific journals, Vollmer says, adding validity to the research. The company’s most recent research is scheduled to appear in the next issue of Pharmacognosy Research, he says. And such publications as Nutrition & Metabolism; Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism; and Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition also have featured 4Life’s studies and results.

Vollmer and Jolley say that 4Life works to set itself apart in the area of science and research, in at least two ways.

The first is that it conducts research during the product development process instead of later “to corroborate preconceived data expectations,” Jolley says. Vollmer explains: “It’s important to do it along the way because we can validate individual ingredient effectiveness, as well as determine if the benefit we presumed isn’t really there.”

The other distinguishing feature of 4Life, as Lee also noted, is its consistent focus on immune health support. “We’re always looking at the immune system,” Vollmer says. “Everything we do should be centered around that.”

Leading with Product

In addition to launching a next-generation 4Life Transfer Factor product, the upcoming convention will introduce distributors to new technology tools that will put retail sales even more front and center.

The existing mobile business app allows distributors to enroll people on the spot, Lee says. A new app being unveiled at the convention will make it easy for them to pass along 4Life product information, too, and text presentation materials. It’s so important to be able to interact naturally with prospects through the technology everyone uses, Lee says, whether you’re at lunch, in the gym or at your neighbor’s house.

Trent Tenney, 4Life senior vice president worldwide sales, agrees that technology is key to connecting with customers and doing so in a way that allows them to share their 4Life product experiences, if they choose to. “It’s going to be imperative that 4Life continues to make it easier for the person who joins to simply share products through the ways they share everything: the smartphone,” Tenney says.

Much of what 4Life has been doing to refine its customer acquisition process stems from the in-depth sales cycle and customer behavior research Tenney has been doing the past two years. He was a member of 4Life’s marketing group for 15 years, he says. But in 2016 the company created the position he now holds so that 4Life could find out “what makes people tick in the transactional stages.”

From studying other high-performing companies in the channel to digging into how 4Life’s star distributors operate, Tenney has been talking to a lot of people. “I haven’t been on the phone this much my whole life—other than when I was 16,” he says.

What he’s hearing is a message that has been resonating among direct selling companies in general, as regulators push for the channel to make retail sales a higher priority. “I’ve uncovered a whole different set of behaviors allowing distributors to introduce products in ways that aren’t offending their networks,” Tenney says. This message has prompted 4Life to make sure its distributors approach most prospects as potential customers, not potential distributors. Prospects are often thinking, “‘I don’t care about your business, but tell me about your product,’ ” Tenney says.

“That kind of awareness shift falls into alignment with the shift in our industry,” adds Brian Gill, 4Life’s new senior vice president of marketing. “Back in 1998, everybody was a distributor—that’s what you were if you wanted to become a customer. But now? We support, promote and market retail sales to end customers who have no interest in building a business.”

Recruit, Reward and Train

But you can’t have customers—especially as many as Lee is tasked with recruiting by 2023—if you don’t have sellers. And since Lee became president last fall, he’s been making a big push to re-energize or replace company incentive programs.

In September 2017, the company launched “Builder Bonus,” an incentive that replaced a legacy program called “Power Pool.” Lee says the program wasn’t as focused on customer volume, but Builder Bonus is very clear: “X behavior gets Y result.” In this case, “X” behavior is signing up two customers or two distributors, with a certain sales volume, and getting the “Y” result of $100 for each person. The program is founded on building and retaining an organization, so the company has tied Builder Bonus to its loyalty program. And that payment will come quickly, through Rapid Rewards, a program 4Life has had for a while but hasn’t promoted well, he says. Rapid Rewards pays the Builder Bonus incentive the very next day.

Builder Bonus targets up-and-coming business builders. “We have great incentives for higher ranks,” Lee says. “We are now leveraging incentives to target the lower ranks, for people who are just getting started.”

To help team members succeed and to help the company reach its aggressive expansion goal, 4Life also recently opened 4Life University, an online training and professional development platform. 4Life University is the first formalized training effort the company has offered, and it covers everything from how to talk about 4Life products to the ethics of direct selling. “We have taken more responsibility than we had prior in training our field, on the essentials of the Transfer Factor product line, in particular,” Tenney says.

‘No Better Way’

The Lisonbees will be at 4Life20 in April to mark the company’s big milestone, congratulate the field teams on their personal wins, and thank everyone for their contributions to the company’s success. They also will highlight the corporate philanthropy work that they spend much of their time and energy doing.

David and Bianca recently returned from Puerto Rico, for example, where the company’s nonprofit Foundation 4Life had flown in 70,000 pounds of life-critical supplies in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. That effort alone has received donations from 40 countries with more than $1 million in cash and supplies. Assembling kits for other disaster victims actually will be the focus of a service project they will launch at 4Life20.

Aside from disaster relief work, 4Life and its distributors are involved in helping to solve chronic issues among people in poverty around the world. Primarily through its 4Life Foundation, established in 2006, the company has donated millions of dollars and hours to such causes as alleviating malnutrition and building homes for families in third-world countries. Since its inception, the organization has overseen service projects in 32 countries around the world.

The 4Life Foundation donates 100 percent of every dollar it collects directly to programs because the company underwrites all of the organization’s operational expenses, Jolley says.

The Lisonbees are as passionate about their company’s ability to do good works in the world as they are about providing goodness for the body. “There is no better way for a large group of people to benefit from bringing a great product to the marketplace and for establishing intercultural relationships,” Bianca says. “Together we can do things we could never do alone.”

“I’d like to be able to look back in another 20 years and see this period as an inflection point for 4Life, that we hit a new wave of momentum.”

—Danny Lee, President and CEO, 4Life Research

As the new captain of the 4Life ship, Lee says that while he’s “quite consumed” with the growth goals he’s facing, he is embracing this more expansive view of the company and its place in the channel.

He says, “I’d like to be able to look back in another 20 years and see this period as an inflection point for 4Life, that we hit a new wave of momentum.”

The post 20 Years: Science Keeps 4Life’s Eye on Longevity first appeared on Direct Selling News.

Gill has 18 years of experience in marketing and team development, and as a key contributor to executive management. In his new role, he will support the company’s strategic objectives, discover new ways to innovate with top-quality tools, provide relevant and timely communications, and create an exceptional brand experience.

“Like our founders, I believe that people come to 4Life at the right time and for the right reason,” said CEO Danny Lee. “Brian comes to us with a wealth of experience in marketing, but more importantly, the kind of marketing specific to direct sales. He will make a great addition to our executive team.”

Prior to joining 4Life, Gill served as vice president of marketing for a startup direct sales company, where he was instrumental in building the brand from scratch and launching six products in the first year. Prior to that, he led the marketing efforts both nationally and internationally for a fast-growing e-commerce, party plan company, implementing marketing communications and promotional campaigns that engaged customers and garnered significant revenue for the company.

Throughout his career, Gill has honed his craft by marketing everything from nutritional and herbal products to cosmetics and skin care.

“I’m grateful to work in an industry where the products and culture are designed to help people achieve a better quality of life,” said Gill. “I’m proud to work for an organization whose brand promise is Together, Building People through science, success, and service.”

The post 4Life Names Brian Gill New Senior Vice President of Marketing first appeared on Direct Selling News.