Amway Talk

Forbes and Business Week magazines are reportedly doing stories related to Amway and Quixtar. The Forbes article is apparently going to have some focus on TEAM, and Business Week on the name change.

They may be published as early as tomorrow (July 25). If anyone sees them, let me know!

Whether they're positive, negative, or neutral is yet to be seen. Given the focus of the Forbes article it wouldn't surprise me if it had somehow been instigated from the Team side, so it's likely to be biased in that direction.

Now you know.

For those who want to check online tomorow:

Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/

Business Week:
http://www.businessweek.com/

It will be interesting to see if Forbes has any connection to the publisher of Woodward's book.

If I'm not mistaken his publisher was not a small no-name company. IIRC it was a big name publisher which is part of a large media group.

Some googling finds it's published by "Business Plus" publishing. Business Plus is a part of Grand Central Publishing which is a division of Hachette Book Group USA.

Hatchette Book Group USA is owned by Hachette Livre/Lagardere a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lagadere, a French
company.

Forbes is owned by the Forbes family.

Business Plus was previously Warner Business Books, part of Time Warner

Regarding the National Ad Campaign,

Amway Global/Quixtar is advertising in BusinessWeek.

They are not advertising in Forbes.

Other business and financial publications they are advertising in are:

TIME
Newsweek
Fortune
Fast Company
Inc.
Money
Smart Money
US News & World Report
USA Today

Here is the article:

http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/forbes/2008/0811/050.html

Not too controversial. Does not really take sides on the Amway/TEAM problems. In fact, the article only mentions it in passing.

ibofightback wrote: it wouldn't surprise me if it had somehow been instigated from the Team side, so it's likely to be biased in that direction.

For your information, most every story like this is "instigated" by somebody.

I know a couple of people here locally who used to work at the newspaper. If you have an interesting story about your business, you can "hire" their PR firm. Then the person calls their old editor friends at the paper and tells them that they have an interesting story and should follow up with you.

More often than not, most business stories are run because the owner or management team hired a PR firm to get the word out about their new location, new product, new management team, etc. Often times companies will use a PR firm to get in the newspaper because they want to sell the business.

Woodward would have a few good reasons for getting a story like this out. Number one, he wants the rest of his TEAM group that did not go to MonaVie to know that he's back in business and doing great. Two, it is a great PR piece for anyone seeing the MonaVie plan from his distributors. Thirdly, it is a public way to get back at Amway.

ibofightback wrote: it wouldn't surprise me if it had somehow been instigated from the Team side, so it's likely to be biased in that direction.

Not Exactly...

If you've read the article, you'll know that ss3251 is right. It takes a pretty dour line on Woodward and TEAM, and tags pretty much all direct selling as "pyramid." If anything, this underlines the case for Amway insisting on authentic retailing as a major part of any Amway business, the FTC's flexibility around self consumption not withstanding.

Nothing in this article that chokes my approach to building this business, however.

And before everyone gets their tail tied in a knot, check out this AMWAY STORY published two hours after the Forbes story, in Information Week:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/per ... =209600502

Amway Parent Catches iPhone Fever

Alticor is among the largest companies to acknowledge publicly that it's launching an iPhone trial.

By Richard Martin
InformationWeek
July 24, 2008 02:20 PM

Attempting to bring its independent distributors the souped-up Web capabilities of the new 3G iPhone, direct-sales leader Alticor is launching a pilot program with the popular Apple handset, starting next year.
Ada, Michigan-based Alticor is the parent company of Amway, which for almost a half-century has sold household items and nutritional supplements to U.S. consumers through a contracted sales force.


More Personal Tech InsightsWhite PapersDemo: MagicJack The Friday ITch: Season 2, Episode 7 Like many IT pros, Alticor CIO Jeffrey Peterson has been intrigued by the powerful touchscreen device since it arrived on the market in June 2007. Apple has sold several million iPhones and moved 1 million units of the new 3G iPhone, which includes enhanced enterprise-grade functionality like beefed-up security and management, in its first weekend in stores.
From the start the iPhone has been "certainly attractive," says Peterson. "But the initial release didn't provide the capabilities around remote management and the security of the information on the device" that the company required.

Last month Apple released the upgraded iPhone that runs over high-speed 3G networks, along with a software development kit for the device that will allow businesses to create or customize applications to run natively on it.

With the new version, Peterson recounts, "We said, 'All right, let's get our hands on it and see if it'll really do the trick now.'"

Alticor's IT team is building the applications for the pilot now. Beginning in January 2009, the program will be limited to a pre-selected group of 150 or so independent business owners (known in Amway-speak as "IBOs") out of the 500,000 distributors in North America. Amway (which is transitioning back to its original brand after an unhappy period under the "Quixtar" moniker) has about 3 million IBOs worldwide. Amway's North America division had revenues of $1 billion-plus the last five consecutive years (globally, Alticor made $7.2 billion in 2007).

Alticor already provides its IBOs with a few Web-based applications they can access via BlackBerrys or other smartphones with Internet connections. The iPhone trial is part of a larger effort to create a suite of Amway-specific mobile business applications and make them available to the sales force. The trial will look at how well the apps function over the iPhone and how they affect sales results.

"If this pans out, the iPhone could become our preferred device," says Peterson, who supports BlackBerry for Alticor's full-time employees. "We'll provide enhanced functionality [for the iPhone] as opposed to the normal functionality we'll provide via any mobile handset."

Alticor is among the largest companies to acknowledge publicly that it's launching an iPhone trial. While the vast majority of iPhone owners are consumers (many of whom presumably use their iPhones for business purposes as well), Apple has stated that it plans to capture a portion the business market now dominated by BlackBerry, in North America, and by Nokia (NYSE: NOK) devices running the Symbian operating system worldwide.

In a series of surveys prior to going forward with the iPhone trial, Alticor found that only 5-6% of its IBOs are currently using smartphones, including the iPhone. Most use basic cell phones for business purposes. But many of the distributors enthusiastically backed the idea of moving to the iPhone.

The response, says Peterson, was "overwhelmingly positive."