Marketing experts say that, despite the baggage attached to the brand, the company is doing the right thing by bringing Amway back to North America in a campaign that launched in March and first made a splash in October with sponsorship of a Tina Turner concert tour that concludes in April.
“My sense is that many of the negative associations of Amway have now begun to fade,” says Tridib Mazumdar, a marketing professor at Syracuse University.
Daniel Howard, a marketing professor at Southern Methodist University, says each term he asks his students whether they have heard of Amway, and each term “the vast majority” respond affirmatively.
“Branding is what marketing is all about, and the decision to do away with Quixtar was an excellent decision,” he says. “The Amway name is already fairly well established in the minds of the American consumer.”
The Quixtar name simply never caught on, company executives say.
“The research said Quixtar had a recognition (rate) of 3%; Amway had a recognition of 76%, as I remember,” says DeVos, referring to a study Alticor that commissioned in 2006.
Van Andel’s and DeVos’ fathers, Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos, founded Amway—an abbreviation of American Way—in 1959, offering the promise that anyone who worked hard could operate their own successful business.
Amway focused at first on household cleaners, then expanded its product line in the 1970s to include more nutritional products and, a decade later, more cosmetics. The company manufactures all its own products.
The Federal Trade Commission examined Amway’s business model during the 1970s, concluding in 1979 that it was not an illegal pyramid scheme because compensation is based on retail sales to consumers and because sales people are not paid for recruiting new colleagues.
Still, it continues to draw critics and government scrutiny, including recent investigations in England, India and China.
Van Andel and DeVos have brought in two key marketing executives to help revitalize the Amway brand in North America.
One is Steve Lieberman, managing director of Amway Global, who spent much of his career at S.C. Johnson and Son Inc., which makes household products such as Windex window cleaner and Ziploc plastic storage bags. The other is Alticor chief marketing officer Candace Matthews, who has worked at The Coca-Cola Co., Procter and Gamble Co. and L’Oreal SA.
Matthews says her job is to “bring the discipline of marketing to an organization that’s been really sales-driven”.
Lieberman came aboard after hearing from a recruiter about an opening at Quixtar.
“I said, ‘Quixtar? I’ve never heard of Quixtar.’ So I went on the Internet and went, ‘Oh, it’s the old Amway company.’ I didn’t know they still existed,” he says.
His two-pronged attack consists of rebuilding the Amway brand and educating distributors and customers. The new ads phase out the Quixtar brand by showing it gradually decreasing in prominence over the course of the ad campaign.
The Amway Global logo modifies the Amway logo that has been used throughout the rest of the world since 2000. Directly below the blue Amway name on a white background now lies the word “Global” in smaller letters, with a thin, red swoosh separating the words.