Business Notes: Marketing

The Fuller Brush Man has been around since 1906, but he hasn't been knocking on many doors in recent years. The sales force, 30,000 in the 1950s, had dropped to 12,000 by last year. Fuller's market penetration was less than 1%. Now the company that instituted door-to-door selling 85 years ago is rebuilding its sales force and changing its marketing strategy. Starting this month, the Fuller Brush Man is abandoning door-to-door sales in favor of a word-of-mouth network like Avon's and Amway's.

The man leading the controversial change, Stuart Ochiltree, was an Avon man for 22 years until last year, when he joined Fuller as president and CEO. To restore the company's luster, he first trimmed the extraneous Avon-ish perfume, gifts and jewelry offerings to focus on quality home-care products. Then he launched the new marketing strategy, allowing sales representatives to augment their own profits with bonuses earned on sales made by distributors in their personal network. With those incentives, the company hopes to expand its sales force to 100,000 and quadruple sales from the present $50 million by 1995. Company research shows more than 80% of all Americans know who the Fuller Brush Man is. He'll now be networking, not knocking.