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US 5,537,314 AGranted
Referral recognition system for an incentive award program
AssigneeFirst Marketrust Intl.
InventorMark W. Kanter
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
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AssigneeFirst Marketrust Intl.
InventorMark W. Kanter
Estimating the term…
A credit accumulation and accessing system for a plurality of sponsoring companies and participants having at each sponsoring company location (14, 16), a common bus (26), which communicates with participant data input (28), performance data input (34), computer processing (24), memory (30), an award output device (36), and an input/output device (32). Input/output device (32) may connect to a central control center (12), and/or a plurality of second sponsoring companies (14, 16), and/or a plurality of financial institutions (94), through communication lines (38). Sponsoring company, participant, and performance data, along with award conversion tables, pyramidal association tables, award applicable merchandise UPC codes, financial-institution-issued lines of credit and computer operational programming, are stored. Under control of the operational program several tasks are accomplished accordingly, including, creating subdirectories for a single participant account so as to selectively associate the single account subdirectories with multiple sponsoring company accounts and deciphering such accordingly at points of sale, calculating, posting, and/or issuing discounts, raffle entries, store-credit returns, points, cash values, bill values, in accordance with performance of participants (72, 74), while sending results immediately and/or periodically to appropriate destinations, which may include computer memory and/or bank accounts and/or plastic cards on behalf of participants, participant sponsors in a pyramidal-type structure, sponsoring companies, sponsoring companies' sponsors in a pyramidal-type structure, raffle sponsors, and redeemed at appropriate locations which may include, sponsoring company, participant, beneficiary, or financial institution bank accounts (52, 54, 82, 84, 94), sponsoring company locations (14, 16), designated sponsoring company award output devices (36), participants' households, beneficiaries' locations, and cash dispensing machines, and received in the appropriate forms, which may include, designated sponsoring company merchandise, wire transfer, check, cash, coupon, certificate, charge card balance reductions, travel tour, or catalog merchandise.
A computer assisted system for a multilevel incentive program for at least one program sponsoring company having individual program participants, comprising:
In a system for an incentive program for at least one program sponsoring company having individual program participants, wherein said system incorporates multilevel marketing and wherein the use of such a system has been limited to a certain type of business wherein said certain type of business is the type of company wherein at least a majority of their business comprises providing customers with end products that said customers order primarily through their catalog, wherein said end products reach said customers' residences from a merchandise supply center primarily by way of at least a person carried type delivery, wherein the person making the delivery is typically other than the customer, improvements comprising:
In a system for a credit card type incentive program wherein individual program participants having credit approval can earn awards based on their own respective purchases, improvements comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.