Terry White, Chief Innovation Officer, Amway Japan

MM: Can you share with us a little bit about some of the things you did there?

TW: In virtual environments?

MM: Yes.

TW: We haven’t released it quite yet. The problem being that what we’re trying to do is build the right expectations in our user community about what it will be, what sorts of behaviors we will tolerate in that space, and how we allow people to freely interact.

One of the problems that we face in that environment is being too good. The more attractive we make it, the more meaningful we make it, the more we can take people to our farms and guide them through the way that we grow our organic ingredients, put them inside the production phase, or even talk about how we might indicate or demonstrate the effect of a particular supplement, or the effect of a particular cosmetic application…

The more attractive we make it, in fact, the more it becomes effective as a recruiting tool. We don’t want recruiting to take place in that space. We respect what Second Life is about. We respect what the pioneers tried to set up.

And we respect the anarchy in the space. We’re trying not to commoditize it. We’re trying not to regulate or monetize the beautiful anarchy that exists in the Second Life space. But it allows us to, 24/7- around the world, regardless of age, location, geography or time -is to take people through the Amway Experience. To say, “This is what we stand for. If somebody told you we stand for something else, they’re wrong. They’re plain wrong.”

MM: So what are aspects of the Amway Experience?

TW: I think it comes down to a few things. I think you can count them on the fingers of one hand.

Amway offers a lifestyle experience to people-regardless of background, regardless of social status, regardless of education. Regardless of what you may have been up until now.

Inside that lifestyle promise, we bring great products to market -in terms of our nutritional supplements-that are all about optimal health. We bring great cosmetics to market. We make sure that people can get access to all of the things that they need to, to enjoy life to the full.

We bring social merit. We let people interact with one another. We let people share passion.

The most popular thing I do in Japan is still our recipe site. We have hundreds of thousands of people interacting with us every day around our pots and pans. That’s a remarkably human thing to experience.

MM: If I understand what you’ve just said-because you’ve just dropped this little pearl… First, the brand is really a framework. It’s a framework in which social interaction occurs. This social interaction occurs around values or facets of the brand.

As all of this is communication interaction around the brand, ultimately it tells a story. It weaves a story. Maybe one meaningful experience at a time. But if we were to stand back and abstract, we’d say, “Yes. There is a story.” There’s the Amway brand story. Then there’s the Artistry. The personal cosmetics story. Then there’s the nutritional story. But it’s all part of a larger narrative.

TW: Absolutely.

MM: As this narrative takes more concrete, visual expression in Second Life or other social media spaces, it really becomes visual storytelling. Visual or architectural storytelling. Three-dimensional storytelling. And people move through this narrative structure.

TW: Correct.

MM: In the West, we have this wonderful 3,000-year old tradition called Aristotelian Poetics. The Greek dramatists and so on. That basically gives us a pretty good set of DNA. Conceptual DNA for how we move people through a story space.

TW: Yes.

MM: So there are some underlying principles. Some tried-and-true, transcendental, always-there facets of this story-dwelling-to use another time we’ve used in the past. As people move through this story-dwelling at one level and a deeper level and a deeper level, the brand begins to take much more of a multi-dimensional living, breathing, it’s-alive kind of dimension. At some point, it almost takes on a life of its own.

TW: And it should.

MM: And it should.TW: The worst thing that brand managers could actually want to do is own a brand. The brand belongs to the people that consume it. A brand is the sum of the emotional relationships that people have with a company or a product or a service.MM: Yes. TW: If you take that tradition that you so eloquently spoke about-I see it like a bit of a tapestry. If you look at the Bayeux tapestry, it’s a remarkably brilliant creation. But from the perspective of art and from the perspective of how one interacts with it, it’s very uni-dimensional.

If you think about how art changed and developed through the Renaissance and through the wonderful froth and bubble of the France of Louis XIV and through that whole enlightenment period-What began to happen to the experience of life?

The story that you’re talking about-the theater that you’re talking about-it’s somebody telling me their experience of life or a life event. Whether it’s painted, whether it’s spoken theater, whether it’s poetry or song-It’s somebody trying to convey to me their experience of life or a life event.

MM: And in such a way that it evokes something in me akin to recognition.

TW: That’s what separates us from the rest of God’s creation. The fact that we have emotional responses to things we see and experience.

MM: Right.

TW: What happens as we look today in 2008 at the tools that we have as brand marketers and communicators-this thing is no longer uni-dimensional. It’s no longer the Bayeux tapestry. It’s not the Mona Lisa. It’s not Cubism. It’s not the Theater of Molière. It’s grown way beyond that.

What Second Life brings is not three-dimensional theater. Second Life brings five-dimensional theater. It allows people to interact with one another as they’re experiencing that life moment.

MM: The key point, Terry, is that it’s the interaction amongst them that produces most of the juice.

TW: Absolutely.

MM: Most of the value.

TW: In those social media spaces, you want to understand the tone and volume of the conversation. From my perspective, the more volume, the better. The more people talking in a social media space, the better.

What we’re trying to measure here is passion. Whether it’s positive passion or negative passion doesn’t matter. The key point for brand marketers and companies is that unless you decide to take action about what people are telling you inside those spaces, you may as well forget it. They won’t come back.

If they keep telling you that you need to change the design of that light switch and you don’t do it, they’ll stop telling you. They’ll go away and they’ll never talk about your light switch again. And soon it gets very dark.

The point is that what we have in the social media environment today. Through each of all the tools that are available to the brand marketer today, from the printed piece all the way through the catalogues through television through all of the media that we’ve been talking about - We’re privileged enough to have the opportunity to occasionally listen in when people are now talking about their experiences with one another.

Did you like that?

MM: Yes. Great.

So that would suggest one or two lines, here. One would be to drill a little deeper into the customer experience of the Amway brand. You’d mentioned in the past doing Air Chuggers and things like that.

TW: Yes.

MM: Or perhaps now it’s time to make the hard left or hard right into the analytics. What are the appropriate analytics that underlie or undergird social media and the social networks?

TW: I love analytics. I just spent 6 months working on designing metric sets for our global business intelligence exercise. I’ve got to tell you that was some of the most fun I’ve had in a long time.

Hey, I’m a communicator. What am I supposed to know about math? But the reality-as I said earlier on-is that what we do is 90% science. If you don’t understand your math and you’re not dealing with the numbers and you do not understand what’s happening, then you should get another job.

MM: The bridge for this, Terry, is a conversation that we’d had a while ago. You’d brought forward the distinction, perhaps from the Clue Train Manifesto folks or whatever-that it’s now a conversation with the consumer. Right?

TW: Absolutely.

MM: I said, “Yes. But the problem with the conversations is they tend to be talk-talk,” without a lot of listening and intelligent response to what was being said.

TW: Yes.