Amway & Their Crappy Reputation Management Campaign
I have noticed that Amway, Quixstar for those in the US, is making a huge marketing push. It appears that they are spending a ton of dough on TV commercials in an attempt to distance themselves from their reputaton as a pyramid scheme. It seems to me that they are attempting to portray themselves as a business that actually earns revenue by selling products as opposed to making money through their MLM scheme. I question whether this marketing plan is going to serve that purpose or if they are wasting a ton of money.
Did they overlook the power of the web?
IMO it seems like they did. They are throwing a bunch of money at television advertising and even went as far to use a different name in the US. The commercials here highlight the fact that they have a different name in the US, Quixtar, but they don’t hide the fact that it is still Amway. This is all well and good but when you do a search online the majority of websites that show up in the SERPs are calling out the pyramid/cultish reputation of the company. They would have been better off throwing some of that money toware SEO and reputation management than trying to change their image through traditional marketing. Take a look at what shows up on the first page of Google when you search for Amway.
TV ads for reputation management are expensive and ineffective
The fact is these ads are not going to help them repair their reputation. Those at the top still make their money through the recruitment of lower level members not the actual products they are selling and anyone who sees these ads and does a quick search will see that. Couple that with the fact that most people largely ignore TV ads and you can see the problem with engaging with traditional advertising for reputation management. Even if they don’t ignore the ads many people will search for an interesting commercial online after they see it. When they do that search and see all of the negative results they will be turned off. There is nothing wrong with running reputation management on TV but to be successful you can’t ignore the web.
Don’t throw your money away by ignoring search
At a minimum you need to run reputation management campaigns online and if you are doing it on TV you damn well better include an online component. Many marketers understand this but some are still ignoring it. Amway appears to have ignored it and because of that they are throwing their money away on expensive and an expensive and ineffective TV campaign with no search compenent.
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Apart from your unfortunate ignorance about how Amway actually works (neither Amway reps nor the company make money from recruiting - it’s all from product sales), I agree entirely about your point re the web.
The problem is it’s so late into the game as to be exceedingly difficult to change. When Amway launched on to the web with Quixtar a decade ago they were so paranoid of folk being accused of spamming, or making legally questionable statements on the internet, that they effectively banned reps from talking about the business online, and actively pulled down websites by reps that gave a positive view of the company.
They left it to the critics.
10 years later so many people get their “education” from the internet that many of the myths and misconceptions about Amway and legitimate MLM have become completely entrenched. You’re not the only one who thinks it’s a thinly veiled pyramid scheme. It’s not helped by the fact that many actual pyramid schemes try to pass themselves of as “We’re legal! We’re just like Amway!.
One of the results of this is that sites like DMOZ will happily list any sites critical of Amway, but they refuse to list sites supportive of Amway, such as some I run - Amway Wiki,The Truth About Amway and Amway Watch. More recently a friend of mine started a WordPress blog to discuss issues surrounding Amway UK, where Amway had been in a dispute with the government (Amway won). Wordpress shut the site down, claiming it was a violation of their TOS. Even though it only discussed Amway, with no direct promotion of the business opportunity or products, and no clear identification of the author, so he couldn’t recruit, they stated they won’t allow any sites “about MLM”. I pointed out they allow a site called “Quixtar is a Cult” which does nothing but criticise Amway and Quixtar. Their reply? It’s OK, it doesn’t promote MLM.
So DMOZ won’t list sites promoting Amway, which affects all the search engine rankings, and sites like WordPress actively delete sites that are supportive of Amway.
So much for “free speech”.
It will likely take years to fix, but the corp has learned and apart from groundroot efforts like mine, the corp themselve have also launched a range of open corporate blogs and other initiatives to try and repair the damage. (eg http://www.theopportunityzone.com
As long as folk like DMOZ and WordPress actively censor “the positive” it’s going to be an uphill battle.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:34 pmThe official site is ranked number one in Google and they have SiteLinks so it is considered a fairly strong site by Google. If nothing else they could utilize that by creating content via traditional pages and a blog to dispel some of the myths a bit sooner. If they are going to spend money on TV ads they should also direct people to their various websites with the commercials.
As far as DMOZ I am not a fan myself. IMO it is an outdated and flawed system. The editors are biased and in many cases they have no editors for certain categories. On the Wordpress issue, they have the right to do whatever they want with their blog service. I assume it was on a free Wordpress blog which means it is on their network and they can control the content. If your friend was hosting the blog under his own domain name I don’t believe they have the right to take it down. If they did I agree that they were wrong.
Wordpress and DMOZ are free to censor anything they want because they have the right to control the content that resides on their sites. It may be unfair but that is the reality of the situation. The whole point of my post was that Amway needs to put more effort in the reputation management towards the web and if they are doing that I say good for them.
Mark,
That’s not true. Amway’s business model has not changed significantly since it was launched in 1959. There has *never* been money made from recruiting. To do so is indeed a classic illegal pyramid.
Q* has had official blogs up for nearly 2 years now (www.opportunityzone.com), and they’re simply not making much headway in the rankings. With so many sites replicating the DMOZ listings, and an active campaign of anti-amway google bombing by the likes of scoobiedavis, as well as otherwise well regarded sites like SkepDic linking to the critics sites and refusing to even have correspondence on the topic - it’s a tough sell. 10 years of a handful of critics cross-linking to eachother with no response by Amway, and actively stopping response by their reps - well, it’s going to take a few years to repair.
I agree with what your saying about WordPress. My main point there is that they apparently have similar misconceptions about all MLMs being scams, with no understanding of the differences between legitimate MLMs and illegal pyramid scams.
Wikipedia was a case in point. It took me many months of incredibly stressful and time consuming work to get the Amway and Quixtar articles to something resembling balance. There was constant needs to go to mediation and arbitration. It’s ok now, though still needs work, but for years it was little more than a link farm for a handful of Amway critics - which of course also got duplicated throughout the internet.
There comes a point where once something becomes “ubiquitous enough”, then internet is considered the ultimate authority, whether it’s actually true or not matters little and the offline world has little influence. There are many many books written about Amway by business leaders, academics, all sorts. They give overwhelmingly positive reviews. But you won’t find what they say on google.
It’s a modern challenge for corporate reputation, and one that many companies, including Amway, haven’t yet worked out how to deal with.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:46 am