Amway introduces you to yourself

The direct selling FMCG brand's recent campaign urges busy urbanites to connect with their inner selves. A look at the marketing effort.

In its recently released ad campaign, Nutrilite, vitamins and dietary supplements brand from Amway, positions itself as a conduit through which people can reconnect with their true inner selves.

Sundip Shah, chief marketing officer, Amway India, tells us, the campaign targets adults in the upper socioeconomic class - SEC A to B1 - who lead active, busy lives and don't have the time and more specifically, the energy, to pursue their personal interests and passions. "The campaign targets people who need a much higher level of health and energy to manage the multiple things they are interested in doing," says Shah, who joined Amway last month from Heinz India.

Shah, who is currently in the process of learning about Amway's business model - "consumers selling to consumers," as he puts it - tells us the campaign is meant to "build consumer interest around the brand so that when Amway's business owners (ABOs) reach out to them, there is already high level of awareness."

Speaking of which, purely from a channel perspective, online shopping has, inadvertently, served to reposition representative, direct selling, agent-based models such as these. To what extent does e-commerce threaten a model like the Amway's? "Amway is offering a set of solutions to the consumer; any option that the consumer has for those solutions is competition. So it's not about the channel but the choices the consumer has," answers Shah.

Presently a Rs 7,000 crore industry, the Indian direct selling channel is projected to grow to Rs 34,000 crore by 2020, as per estimates from PHD Annual Survey, Shah shares. The direct selling channel, he explains, has "the advantage of personal touch", where the direct seller personally explains the product features to people known to her/him. "The online selling medium lacks that personal touch and trust, so we do not consider it a major threat to the direct selling model," Shah says.

Interestingly, he adds, "However most direct selling companies are also leveraging online selling - but to their distributors - as it provides them ease of placing orders and home delivery. For example, at Amway, over 30 per cent of our sales to distributors comes from e-commerce."

Created by Rediffusion-Y&R, the campaign has a strong human interest angle. The thought of connecting to the 'most natural you', afaqs! learns, is a global one that has been interpreted for Indian consumers, through this film. "This campaign gives the product meaning in the 'life context'. In day to day life, you miss out on the things you always wanted to do, simply because you don't have the time - and health - for it," Shah explains, saying the TVC positions Nutrilite as the solution to this.

Talking about the brief to the agency, Deepali Shukla, regional head, nutrition, Amway (Europe, India and Africa), says, the campaign serves to change the mindset of people towards health supplementation from "curative", something one takes as a remedy to a deficiency or a medical condition, to "preventative", something one takes to enjoy a better quality of life.

According to Chraneeta Mann, national creative director (regional), Rediffusion-Y&R, while there was already a fair amount of awareness about the brand's health supplements, her task was to "take supplements to the holistic lifestyle space."

"To the average consumer out there, the health supplement market tends to be very prescriptive (that is, 'doctor recommended') in nature," Mann says, summing it up with, "So we developed a campaign around people who, to some extent, have lost what they were all about, encouraging them to complete themselves as individuals again."

The TV campaign is being supported on digital, print, and outdoor channels.