UT-based Nu Skin's $20M sponsorship of the 2002 Winter
Games and U.S. Olympic teams offers the network marketer of
personal-care products "the chance to become established as
a championship-caliber company," according to Edward Carter
of the DESERET NEWS. ME-based Highland Marketing Group
President Jack Cowie III, who managed IBM's Olympic
campaigns, noted the high-end status of Olympic sponsors and
said, "You are talking about some of the finest corporate
marketing operations the world has ever known. People are
going to assume Nu Skin products are of Olympic caliber."
Since announcing the sponsorship six months ago, Nu Skin has
initiated a "massive effort to show its nearly 500,000
distributors worldwide how to benefit from the Olympic
link." Nu Skin Dir of Olympic Programs Brent Goddard:
"We've made quite an investment for a company of our size
and type. We want to Olympi-size our entire operation."
The company's marketing campaign will include business
cards, stationary, Olympic pins, billboards and TV and radio
ads that "pair" the Nu Skin logo with the five-ring Olympic
logo. Cowie, on Nu Skin's $20M investment: "They'll make
that back in spades. They have just given every single one
of their salespeople ammunition to make sales." Nu Skin
currently has three full-time employees working on its
Olympic initiative, with plans to hire a consultant with
Olympic experience, and it will commit 10% of its employees
to volunteer during the 2002 Games (DESERET NEWS, 5/9).
