To this day, I still see people who like to hide the Amway name when recruiting others. I believe this tactic has been a major factor in why Amway has a bad reputation in North America. When I was recruited, I was lied to as well. I was invited to a "beer bust" only to find out it was an Amway meeting. To be polite, I never complained about it during the meeting, but I went home that night thinking WTF was that? They lie to us and then expect us to join the business. And to this day, I believe this practice continues.
Over the years, IBOs have tried all kinds of ways to disguise the Amway opportunity. It was network marketing, e-commerce, online shopping mall and the corporation even changed Amway in North America to "Quixtar" at one time. Sadly, the name change to quixtar did not work, probably because the same tactics were used when recruiting new IBOs into Quixtar. Amway eventually changed the name back to Amway. I believe this bad reputation in North America is why Amway seems to be enjoying the most business growth overseas where people either do not know the Amway name, and likely because there haven't been enough former Amway/AMO victims to soil the name in other countries. But conversely, Amway sales tanked for a while and apparently only started a minor recovery recently.So, Amway IBOs, how can you expect someone to trust you and do business with you if you are deceitful or outright lie about the Amway opportunity? Are you ashamed of the Amway name? If you are ashamed or scared to drop the "A bomb" on people, how will you ever be able to show any plans, let alone sponsoring anyone into the business? My former sponsor used to tell our group that the biggest challenge is overcoming the name Amway. To be fair, Amway the corporation is not the only reason for the bad reputation. It is the unethical and bad behavior of IBOs that lead to a bad reputation buy on the other hand, it's not the like Amway police have been cracking down and visibly taking action against the violators, so Amway is also guilty to some degree.
Conversely, people who come right out and talk about Amway are unlikely to net any decent results either because of the past reputation. It's an almost no-win situation for IBOs and prospects. For these reasons, I believe it to be nearly impossible to build and maintain a group, especially if your goal is to reach diamond. It seems as if more diamonds have left Amway in recent years than there have been new diamonds. I believe this to be spot on for WWDB, my former LOS. So IBOs, are you ashamed of Amway? If not, why are there still so many IBOs using trickery and deception in recruiting prospects?
2 comments:
Amway's reputation was shattered in the beginning of this century by the coming of the internet, the widespread publicity about the fraudulence of MLMs in general, and by several very damaging news reports. In addition, legal problems hit Amway, both from angry former IBOs and from governmental prosecutors. Add to all this the word-of-mouth spread of horror stories about Amway lies and the arrogance of up-line methods.
The desperate attempt of Amway to change its name and downplay its connection to all of this bad hype was a sign of real fear in Ada, Michigan. Most Amway big pins, culturally speaking, were essentially children of the late 1950s and 60s, and they were unprepared for the massive public information explosion that the internet created. Crap that you could keep hidden in 1975 was no longer hidden, and this had a major negative effect on recruitment. When the internet started to get really huge, the big-pin up-lines went to Amway and demanded that something be done about the negative publicity. The name change to "Quixtar" was a half-hearted attempt, but it didn't work, and instead the idea was to downplay the name "Amway" in recruitment and just suck in new people with talk about dreams and future riches.
This definitely created a problem for low-level IBOs. The name "Amway" had to be mentioned sometime in the recruitment process, and how could you then lie and say that it wasn't Amway? All sorts of stupid excuses were proposed, such as "Tell them this is WWDB, not Amway," or "Say that we handle some Amway products," or "Tell them that this is not the old Amway, but a new version," or "Don't answer them directly, but ask them what they have heard about Amway."
Excuses like this would no doubt work with some stupid or dimwitted persons, but a person of ordinary intelligence would immediately see that something was wrong. Not only would an intelligent person see through the bullshit, but he would also see a red flag -- why the hell is this Amway recruiter lying to me?
It's not that the IBO was ashamed of being in Amway, but he was really in a logically impossible position. He was up against the massive bad publicity that Amway was drowning in, and he had to somehow convince a potential recruit to ignore it. This dilemma caused what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance" -- saying one thing while actually thinking something totally different. It's a condition that affects almost everyone in Amway these days.
Amway did try something else -- the hiring of publicity flacks like Steadman and Barron to go around the internet attacking anyone who wrote against Amway or criticized it. This didn't work at all, because these flacks were completely swamped in hundreds of anti-Amway anecdotes from ex-IBOs, and by very heavy pushback from blogs like those of Joe Cool and Anna Banana and David Brear. The bad publicity only got worse for Amway.
This is why Amway recruitment in North America is now basically dead.
Actually, Amway recruitment is completely stagnant here in the United States. Individual AMOs may make some money here and there, but that money is essentially from fees and tools, and it dries up when individual IBOs get wise and drop out of the scheme.
It's now very difficult to recruit somebody into the racket. Once you manage to hook somebody, the main goal is to bleed him dry of funds for as long as possible.
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