Amway India Articles
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MAKING OF THE DREAM
Privately held by the DeVos and Van Andel families of US, Amway, short for American Way, was set up in 1959. Amway and its publicly traded sister companies supported 53 affiliate operations worldwide. About 70% of Amway 's sales were outside North America. With over 12,000 employees around the world, Amway was renowned for its strong R&D centre in Michigan, which had 24 laboratories. Amway was present in over 80 countries and its manufacturing plants were located in US, Hungary, Korea, China and India. The company had over 3 million distributors across the world. Besides its direct selling portfolio of 450 products, Amway promoted around 3,000 products through catalogue sales2 as well.
Amway had received permission from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) in 1994, to invest $15 million in the Indian operations and to source products from India. The company began with identifying small and medium-scale companies to source its products from. Commercial operations began in May 1998 with a partnership arrangement with Network 21, a company, which acted as a support system and assisted in organizing training, seminars and meetings. Besides its extensive internal research efforts before entering India, Amway also conducted market research through agencies such as Pathfinders and ORG-MARG. Though prior to its entry into India, Amway did recognize the need for a special India-specific pricing strategy and eventually there were just a few marginal cuts in the prices, which were still almost 20% higher than those of the competing FMCG products. The company began with appointing distributors in the country by adopting the ‘NRI sponsored 'by getting NRIs to rope in their friends/relatives in India into Amway distributorship. These distributors were duly provided with starter business kits containing products, training material, and sales literature.
The company 's introductory product range comprised four home care and two personal
MAKING OF THE DREAM
Privately held by the DeVos and Van Andel families of US, Amway, short for American Way, was set up in 1959. Amway and its publicly traded sister companies supported 53 affiliate operations worldwide. About 70% of Amway 's sales were outside North America. With over 12,000 employees around the world, Amway was renowned for its strong R&D centre in Michigan, which had 24 laboratories. Amway was present in over 80 countries and its manufacturing plants were located in US, Hungary, Korea, China and India. The company had over 3 million distributors across the world. Besides its direct selling portfolio of 450 products, Amway promoted around 3,000 products through catalogue sales2 as well.
Amway had received permission from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) in 1994, to invest $15 million in the Indian operations and to source products from India. The company began with identifying small and medium-scale companies to source its products from. Commercial operations began in May 1998 with a partnership arrangement with Network 21, a company, which acted as a support system and assisted in organizing training, seminars and meetings. Besides its extensive internal research efforts before entering India, Amway also conducted market research through agencies such as Pathfinders and ORG-MARG. Though prior to its entry into India, Amway did recognize the need for a special India-specific pricing strategy and eventually there were just a few marginal cuts in the prices, which were still almost 20% higher than those of the competing FMCG products. The company began with appointing distributors in the country by adopting the ‘NRI sponsored 'by getting NRIs to rope in their friends/relatives in India into Amway distributorship. These distributors were duly provided with starter business kits containing products, training material, and sales literature.
The company 's introductory product range comprised four home care and two personal
References: Chen, Robert, Wang & Cheng, 1998; “The Success Factors for Direct Selling Business”, 1998 Asia Pacific Decision Sciences Institute Conference, Proceedings p.p. 17-23. Reichheld, F. F., 1996, Ed.; “Quest for Loyalty: Creating Value through Partnership”; Harvard Business School Press: Cambridge, MA. Wotruba, Thomas R., 1990; “Full-Time vs. Part-Time Salespeople: A Comparison on Job Satisfaction, Performance, and Turnover in Direct Selling", Intern. J. of Research in Marketing 7, 97-108 | We are listening article source(http://marketingpractice.blogspot.com/2008/05/amway-india-we-are-listening.html)