#1028 New American Way

The other day I was thumbing through a news magazine and I saw an ad that floored me like I’d slipped on a bar of soap. It was from Amway. That’s right, world shattering. An actual advertisement in a national publication from Amway.
Amway, the king of Multi-Level Marketing. I remember meetings where I was told Amway would never ever ever stoop to advertising. That was the old way, not the Amway. Advertising was an expense for ninnies. Amway used the power of word of mouth and it delivered it personally.
That’s why you could make a million bucks with your own Amway distributorship. Or so they promised.
So it’s absolutely amazing to see Amway advertising. I always said back then that one key to looking legitimate was to advertise. People feel you have something on the ball just by seeing your advertisement. You seem more like a business. Like you’re playing the game.
Amway meetings of my era were almost like cult gatherings. Distributors with various designations based on gemstones. Mysterious circles and symbols shining on walls from overhead projectors. And lots of firm handshakes and televangelist smiles.
All to obscure an underlying structure that looked suspiciously like a pyramid. I wonder if Bernie Madoff ever went to an Amway meeting.
The audience was littered with Shaklee and Herbalife survivors, searching for a new shining way to wealth. Preferably effortless. And it seemed to be that the product itself was less important than the method you used to sell it. It wasn’t about the soap. It was about selling the soap.
That always seemed a little disconnected to me. If it was good soap and you advertised normally, and you backed up your product, why did you need 8 levels of distributors beneath you? Then again, I never understood credit default swaps.
The name Amway is a contraction of American Way. One of their big early sales cult methods was to invoke the fervor of patriotism. So the strangest thing about the ad I saw was its message.
It introduced “Amway Global.”
Dude, does this mean they’re going to outsource the construction of our pyramid?
America, ya gotta love it.