Mary Kay
| Mary Kay
|
|
|---|---|
 |
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| legal form | Inc. |
| founding | 1963 |
| Seat | Addison , United States |
| Branch | Cosmetics |
| Website | www.marykay.de |
Mary Kay is a brand of the US cosmetics group Mary Kay Inc. , which mainly sells facial care products and decorative cosmetics. The products have been available in Germany since 1986; the company's headquarters in Germany are in Munich. In 2005 the group had sales of $ 2.2 billion. Its headquarters are in Addison , Texas .
Business strategy
The group was founded in 1963 and is run according to a business strategy established by founder Mary Kay Ash . Since 1976 the brand has been traded on the New York Stock Exchange ; In 1985, the company was privately owned by Ash through a leveraged takeover. This means that the company is no longer obliged to disclose all financial data.
distribution
Sales are organized as structured sales , ie independently working “Beauty Consultants” (German: “Beauty Consultants”) present the products to customers at home. Customers have the opportunity to try out the products before buying.
Beauty consultants can recruit more women and thus set up their own sales group. If the turnover is sufficient, a new sales unit is created, the head of which is called the “director”. They receive a commission on the turnover of their members and have the opportunity to earn a pink company car.
criticism
Animal testing
In the People's Republic of China , the law requires cosmetics to be tested on animals before they appear on the market, so Mary Kay products must also be submitted there for testing.
Distribution system
Mary Kay's sales system is based on the fact that customers recruit further customers and thus become part of the system themselves as salespeople. The sellers first have to buy the Mary Kay products themselves at a set price and can then resell them at a suggested price, with a maximum of 50% remaining as income. Since the price may vary downwards in terms of the discount, the 50% is only very rarely reached, according to some sellers.
In this way, the market risk is transferred from the group to the individual sellers, who are exposed to the risk of not being able to sell the goods and thus losing their investment in purchasing goods. In order to counteract this risk, Mary Kay offers the sellers the opportunity to take back the goods, but only 90% of the purchase price will be refunded. As a result of a return, considerable pressure is sometimes exerted on the sellers.
However, the company is still aggressively promoting the distribution system. According to former saleswomen, Mary Kay promises high income with little effort, although in practice this is not achieved in most cases. Only about 300 of the 600,000 American sales members have a six-figure income. Another point of criticism here is the use of partly feminist rhetoric specially tailored to the female target group, which leads the women involved to believe that they will be able to fulfill their duties as wife and mother anchored in the conservative American value system and at the same time their own To run business.
The distribution system can in practice be referred to as a product-based pyramid system, although it is represented differently in theory.
literature
- Claudia Groß: Multi-Level Marketing. Identity and ideology in network marketing. Dissertation, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-15936-2 . esp. p. 125ff, chapter 8: Mary Kay Cosmetics - 'a way to a better life'? Online reading samples .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Claudia Groß: Multi-Level-Marketing - Identity and Ideology in Network Marketing . VS-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-15936-2 (Zugl .: Mannheim, Univ. Diss., 2007).
- ^ Maysa Rawi: Cruelty-free? Avon and Estée Lauder under fire as Peta reveals cosmetic brands 'ordered animal testing'. In: femail. February 22, 2012, accessed January 20, 2015 .
- ↑ a b c d Article at CBS (eng.)
- ↑ theinvestigativefund.org (eng.) ( Memento of the original from January 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ fairgroundmedia.com (eng.)
- ↑ marketplace.org (eng.)
- ↑ jezebel.com (eng.)
- ↑ CNBC (Eng.)
- ↑ Glenn Hunter: Harper's calls Mary Kay a Pink Pyramid Scheme. In: frontburner.dmagazine.com. July 27, 2012, accessed on January 20, 2015 (eng).
