Marketing of herbalife

At the time of its founding in the early 1980s, Herbalife emerged in a highly opportunistic environment.  The general of population was becoming more and more attentive at their health-conscious, and dieting was becoming a commonplace activity. Today, Herbalife realized a turnover of 8 billions of dollars. So, we can ask us what are the keys to Herbalife success. Firstly, it seems essential to deal with a brief presentation of the society.

Herbalife is a global multi-level marketing corporation that develops outstanding nutrition products helping people losing weight or improve their lifestyle.

The key of success of this brand are based on two factors: the offer and the business model.

The company offers consist on products from herbal and biological industry, in order to appear as the purest company of supplements nutrition. But the essentially key of success rests in the “controversially” business model and the organization of the sales forces.

Herbalife is a company which employees independents, there isn’t owner shops. The management is organized as a scale, in order to motivate the independents to excel, in brief to climb the “scale”.

But since a decade, Herbalife is sued by several polemics divided in two sections: the model and the sanity secure of their products.  The society is accused of illegal pyramid scheme, inspired of Ponzi model. Because the society requires their new recruits to buy a starter-pack, they can’t work in tense flow, because they just have one warehouse in France (57).

Beyond this situation, Herbalife rests a huge success on the market of nutrition supplements.

They succeed to impose their products as an exemplary lifestyle. The company has an extensive supply chain of Herbalife distributors.  The company has over 2.7 million independent distributors all around the world, and these distributors are currently operating in 88 different countries.

Moreover, the brand name Herbalife has a lot of signification in the minds of the customers, despite the bad communication and the controversy, the customers continue to buy Herbalife’s products because they are convincing that is the purest nutrition as they can find on the market.

We can notice that the future of Herbalife is “unstoppable”, even if a lot of competitors and old adepts are against and try to sensitize consumers, the market of supplements is increasing years after years, and the identity of the brand is too strength.

This doesn’t mean that Herbalife isn’t threatened. The consume of biological and natural product become less and less a priority in the minds of people.

In addition, Herbalife is reeling from a recent recall of their products, judges as lying about the ingredients.

As to conclude, Herbalife faces a hard competitive environment than was the case several decades ago.  In addition, Herbalife’s reputation has fallen from the negative image, a model discussed and the stock market.

Herbalife stays a strength brand for the moment, but they have to take the good decision in the years to come.

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