by Paul Kemp

Created on: March 09, 2009   Last Updated: March 11, 2009

Herbalife distributors understand marketing well enough to have made it a billion dollar company. That's not too shabby.

They did this mostly before the Internet was available to the average person for more massive marketing efforts, like we use today. So, they did pretty well with the marketing strategy they had at the time - a large button, imprinted with the words, "Lose Weight Now, Ask Me How".

I would say that qualifies as offline "pull" marketing, as long as the button wearer waits for passersby to ask them about weight loss, IF they are interested. Not a bad strategy and very duplicatable.

Now that the 'Net has arrived as a marketing tool, the Herbalife strategy may seem rather anachronistic, but the fact is that it served the company well in creating tremendous growth in a relatively short time.

Times have definitely changed with the large majority of people in the developed countries using the World Wide Web for finding information they are interested in. Typing in a few keywords now brings to the searcher the exact information they seek, all without waiting to come across someone wearing an advertising button or wearing a sandwich-sign.

The 'Net is convenient and quick and is well-suited to attraction marketing, which has been found to work best in this new medium. (Perhaps I should do a quick search to see if Herbalife distributors STILL understand marketing, but I suspect some of them do, though they have probably changed their tactics.)

Marketing by wearing a visible imprinted button in public places still counts as marketing. It invites personal contact by the curious. This is not a bad strategy, but it is limited in its reach.

It may be especially effective if the button-wearer has used the Herbalife products and lost a lot of weight themselves. Then, any inquiry from those who seek to lose weight would initiate the possibility of a moving emotional transfer of enthusiasm from the marketer to the interested questioner. I have known purveyors of weightloss products to use similar methods to build a large and loyal customer base.

So, let us not crticize what obviously works. Herbalife's offline method of marketing their weightloss products worked very well.

To continue to use such a marketing method exclusively when more far reaching and automated methods are available would be the only thing worthy of criticism here, from my perspective.

It would be interesting to see how Herbalife has adapted its online marketing now that its button campaign seems to have been retired.

Learn more about this author, Paul Kemp.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.