Amway Accents the Positives in 2009

What’s in a name? Plenty, when your company has a half-century heritage like Amway. But the Ada, MI-based company dropped that well-known moniker back in 2000 in the U.S. and Canada to become part of an umbrella company called Alticor Inc. To further confuse the issue, the company tried to develop an online business under the Quixtar name.

But now, with its 50th anniversary approaching in May, Alticor is retiring the Quixtar label and pouring millions of dollars into reviving the Amway brand in North America with market research, national television commercials and ads in newspapers and magazines and online. The company will use a transitional name, Amway Global, before reverting, in about a year, to Amway.

“We thought, well, if we’re going to build a brand, build the brand that everybody knows already,” Alticor president and co-CEO Doug DeVos said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It’s going to be much more successful and cost a lot less and happen a lot faster.”

The Amway brand is being revived years after the company fought allegations that its direct sales operations was a pyramid scam.

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. In fact, in one consumer study commissioned by the company, only 3% of consumers recognized the Quixtar brand, while 76% recognized Amway.

To help revive the Amway name, the company hired two marketing executives: Steve Lieberman, managing director of Amway Global, who spent much of his career at S.C. Johnson & Son Inc., and Alticor chief marketing officer Candace Matthews, who has worked at Coca-Cola Procter & Gamble Co. and L’Oreal SA.

Yet, despite all the name confusion, sales continue to grow. Last year, the company said sales topped $7 billion and the company predicts sales will rise another $1 billion this year, even with much of the world immersed in economic turmoil.