Terry White, Chief Innovation Officer, Amway Japan

MM: The other offsetting dimension of that is the degree to which that commitment has been socialized. How many communication interactions and collaborations have you had with others around the commitment to the experience?

If you think about this as an XY plot and that magic corner up there in terms of high commitment and high interaction, you have what you might call “Brand Theater.” Where everyone has a role. They hit their marks. They say their lines. And they create brand experiences for their other actors in the theater.

TW: Yes.

MM: It’s how user-generated content and social networks create the value that users attract. Now it’s just simply a matter of looking at brand theater as an intersection or interaction of — one — how many people have a deep commitment to the experience of the brand, and then, how many people interact with each other around that commitment?

TW: I agree completely. I have to say that the notion of “brand theater,” brings to my mind the idea of master practitioners, practicing an art. We all know that some people are good at theater, and some people are not. I think that’s true for brand, as well.

MM: That comes to another thing that I think you’ve done brilliantly. Excuse me for tooting your horn, here. One of the challenges that I see and have seen all around the world is, how you communicate the value proposition of a brand to multiple stakeholders in one elegant phrase or brand-stand.

You developed this slogan called “Growing Beautiful Together.” I thought that was brilliant. It spoke to growing the business — the Amway distributor business. It got to this underlying natural products, good ingredients, and high-quality products. And as you’ve mentioned to me many times before, Amway is one of the largest manufacturers of green detergents. One of the largest manufacturers of natural ingredient personal care products and cosmetics. One of the largest manufacturers of herbal supplements and vitamins.

TW: Correct.

MM: So that whole notion of “Growing Beautiful,” as opposed to “Aging Gracefully,” is like you’ve collaps

ed or brought many dimensions into that one phrase. Many threads of a multi-stakeholder brand value proposition.

TW: Thank you.

MM: Yes. That was great.

The other thing about it that kind of syncs up to what we were talking about in terms of brand theater. Every effective brand tells a story. The best brand stories not only have a beginning, middle and end-but they become part of the culture. Such that we have other people repeating and augmenting and making their own that brand story.

TW: Yes.

MM: As we talk about consumer focus and how the consumer now has taken hold of the brand, this naturally kind of segues into social networking and social media. I’m curious what you’ve been up to in that area. Not the least of which, I should remind people that tare listening in or reading this-Amway from the get-go was one large social networking platform.

TW: Well, we were the original social network.

MM: Explain that.

TW: The way that people interacted with one another. The way that people had friends and they had a desire to start a business. They wanted some supplemental income. They went out and found some products. We found some products that people wanted to buy.

People then began to proselytize the products and sell those products with a lot of passion to the people around them. Suddenly it turned into a huge business.

When I say that, it’s not luck. But the fact was that we took on the shape of peoples’ personal networks, and we didn’t do this deliberately…

MM: But now that you’ve done it, it can be reverse-engineered, and can inform many things that we do online.

TW: Absolutely. I think the place that I get to on this is, if we were the original social network, then the obvious place for us to play now is online in a similar social network piece. I’ve been spending some time maybe the last year or so-meeting colleagues from all around the world-looking at how we might do that.

How do we take that passion, the best parts of what we do, and what we say? How do we take that and allow people to play in a brand space-inside a social media space that gives full range of expression to what people feel about us and our products and our business opportunity?

You have to be really careful about it. Apart from generating advertising revenue, I don’t think anyone has yet been successful in putting together an effective business model for a company to operate in the social media space.

If you look at what people have done in FaceBook or MySpace or Second Life-none of it is stunningly exciting for the bean counters. There’s not a whole lot of revenue flying around in that space without trying to dominate the consumer-without taking away the voice-without letting people feel free to express their opinions, and recommend stuff to one another. Or recommend against stuff.

How do you do it in such a way that you’re not afraid of the outcome? How do you do it in such a way that you actually build confidence in your brand by having people interact about it? You’re not going to get 100% positive feedback. Certainly, any company that I can think of off the top of my head will not do that.

We’ve been spending a lot of time trying to figure out how we might do that. I think we’ll get to a place pretty soon where we figure out how we bring in trusted experts outside of our organization to actually coordinate that emotional soup that social media represents. I think it will be a fascinating process.
I’ve got to say that unless we do it well, it could really backfire. But I have every confidence we can do it well. I see what people do in a social media space, and we’ve got teams of people out there who are actively trying out the different social media spaces. They’re trying to figure out how to integrate all of these things.
If somebody would just come out with the ultimate aggregation tool that allowed me to bring all of my social media streams to a single screen and interact with them all seamlessly in a web services environment… That’s where I think we have to end up.

MM: Yes.

TW: I’m pretty confident we can do it. And I’m pretty confident it’s not going to cost a lot of money.

MM: Tell me about things you’ve been doing in Second Life-you spend some time in a female avatar out there. Right?

TW: Yes. I do. The reason I do that is not because I’m kinky or weird. The reason I do it is that it’s a lot easier to walk around as a girl. You don’t get bothered as much.

MM: Really?

TW: Yes. And people are a lot more friendly and open, actually. And the gear is much nicer.

MM: How has this informed you as a brand marketer?

TW: I think Second Life or any virtual experience, I think, is all around brand experience. For a company like ours, in that space, I think what we have to do is not try to generate a commodity trade. I think what we have to do is provide people with brand experiences.

We’re not talking about operating Amway’s business in Second Life. We’re not talking about buying products and walking into shops and doing that entire sort of thing. The challenge for our creative strategists is to figure out how we make a virtual world -an Amway Brand experience that has meaning and relevance, and is not just some roller-coaster ride-or that I can test-drive what looks like a new car, or something like that.

How do you actually carry it off? The trouble that any actor has at any time. How do you actually carry meaning into that piece of theater?

MM: In the past, you’d mentioned or talked about the “Amway Experience Center.”

TW: Yes.