Amway. The company synonymous with the term Multi-Level Marketing. A word that brings up a lot of emotions. Hundreds of web sites opposed, and thousands of pro-Amway web sites flooding the landscape hiding behind the name "Quixtar."
As you know, Multi-Level Marketing has been the buzzword of the internet age. Anyone with an email address with any activity (outside of an intranet box set aside only for lovers) has had to deal with emails declaring the existance of a product which will earn you millions while others sell it for you -- or have run into a web site that was piled thick with pictures of material riches and promises that, if you join up with the web page owner's company, you too can own these things.
Of course, MLM's have been around for a while. Even before Amway, there were companies that paid distributors for developing new distributors. Amway itself was an outgrowth of Nutrilite, another MLM Company, developing in response to that company's wish to place its products in stores and expand its market beyond its sales force.
So what happened? What was it about Amway that allowed it to develop a life of its own? And how was it able to affect the development of MLMs to the degree that the MLM has become such a pest and cancer to the internet? Why are there now thousands of web pages acting as Quixtar "stores?"
In short, Why Amway?
As with most happenings, it's not so much one thing as a number of things. I, however, can bring up five important items which have marked Amway as distinct in the area of MLM's:
1) Nutrilite
In The Origin of Multilevel Marketing, Stephen Barrett talks about the Nutrilite company's start, its growth and its problems with the FDA. It also talks about how the company decided to develop its sales force by leaving recruitment to the salesmen through a Multi-Level Marketing plan.
The article also refers to DeVos and Van Andel, but in my opinion understates the importance of these two. Nutrilite found them so important that when they made waves about the company's plan to sell through stores as well as through its salespeople, the company offered them leadership positions within the company. However, DeVos and Van Andel decided to find a different product to sell instead, using that product as a backup in case Nutrilite went through with their threat.
2) Selling products that people need to use
Most MLMs sell health products or other items that most people don't need as their main product. Whether the item being sold is health aids, lawyer insurance or electricity saving devices; the question is always whether to buy, not when to buy. When Amway opened for business selling a laundry detergent named Frisk (later changed to LOC), they sold a product everyone used.
Of course, there are people who will say that the company was the first to come out with an "environmentally friendly product." This is true; they were also the first detergent company to concentrate their product. However, this is but details (and details which most MLMs like to bring up, as they like to make themselves out as ecologically holier than the mainstream products); the important thing about the company is that they were the first to market a product that people HAD to use.
3) Advertising
DeVos and Van Andel went around the country in the sixties selling Amway in a bus, and Amway placed advertisements on television during the seventies and eighties. For many people, this was the first exposure to Amway they had, and I'm sure it had a positive spin on people's opinions of the company for many years.
Most MLMs leave their advertising to the distributors, hence the "Lose Weight Now, Ask Me How" advertisements plastered all over telephone poles and the constant Spam which now marks the internet as it is today. Amway, having done its own advertising for many years, got its name out in a better light.
4) A style of selling that fit modest goals (in the beginning).
Every so often you hear of someone who actually has good feelings towards Amway because of their experience. One person talks about his father still receiving a couple hundred dollars a month despite years of inactivity, another talks about a piano they were able to get because they sold SA-8, yet another person saved the money he earned from selling (and probably sponsoring) to buy himself a house by the lake.
Most of these stories come from the sixties (although the man buying the house by the lake actually dates from the mid seventies), during the time when it was the more modest goals that drove the distributors. It was also this time when the Amway was spreading across the land, and it was this sales force that established both the networks and the good name of Amway.
5) Bill Britt and Dexter Yager (random factors).
DeVos and Van Andel had started with the idea of the distributor making a few needed (or extra) bucks, and until the early eighties they held to the party line. It was Bill Britt and Dexter Yager who created the "motivation organizations" and changed the Amway Corporation goal from "a hundred dollars a month" to "becoming a Millionaire."
As it happened, the change couldn't have happened at a more opportune time (for Amway, that is). The advantages that Amway had with their products (cheaper, more ecological) were disappearing in the late sixties and early seventies, and sales were getting harder to do. Not only that, but the type of person attracted to Amway wasn't necessarily a salesman, and needed some reason to do something for the company.
It turned out to be a devil's deal. Amway became more prosperous and turned DeVos and Van Andel into two of the richest men in the planet, but the Amway name became tainted with the Tools trade that developed. How badly the name was tainted can be measured by the Quixtar "takeover" of the sales force (with Amway becoming merely the brand name of the products) and the covering of both companies under the "Alticor" name.
After all, you have to admit the name "Amagram" had personality. The name "Achieve" doesn't.
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