In an exclusive first interview, AdvoCare’s newly appointed Chief Executive Officer Christina Helwig sat down with Direct Selling News to share her vision for one of the industry’s most well-known wellness brands.
AdvoCare has more than three decades of proven success, but the marketplace is constantly changing. How does a brand with such deep roots remain nimble?
Christina Helwig: It’s become an anchor for us to say that we remain in a constant state of evolution as a brand. The biggest shift today is that we are really leaning into an omnichannel strategy. Direct sales has been and always will be one of the channels we use to share our great products, but we are looking at different channels, too. We launched AdvoCare on Amazon as our first, third-party marketplace almost two years ago and we are now available at Walmart.com. We’re also exploring and preparing to launch on social commerce, like TikTok Shop and Meta. Our presence in those third-party marketplaces is primarily about protecting the brand. We want our customers to have the same experience whether they buy our products on Amazon, from a distributor, or directly from our website.
How has your digital approach shifted along with consumer demand?
Christina Helwig: We’re continuing to evolve our ecommerce business through AdvoCare.com. That’s how customers spend most of their time shopping today, and we want to make sure that we’re meeting them where they are and providing an expedited shopping and checkout experience that has no barriers. That focus has been really critical to our success for the last four to five years and is something we’ll continue to focus on as we evolve and grow..
How has your omnichannel approach impacted your distributor base?
Christina Helwig: Brand awareness only strengthens the distributor’s ability to have a conversation with someone and to share the product. That’s something we take on to better support their needs and give them the best chance to get the products out into the public. We’re continuing to build the great trust we have with our distributors, and transparency has been a critical part of their success in meeting personal goals and our relationship with them.
What is your vision for helping AdvoCare grow in a new direction while maintaining its legacy roots and loyal customer base?
Christina Helwig: We’re heavily focused on the right balance between new customer acquisition and existing customer retention. It’s a pendulum, and we are working to find the right sweet spot. We’ve launched ads on Spotify, strengthened our loyalty programs, launched a subscription program, and are continuing to see success with our influencer collaborations. It’s our goal to find new and different ways to create brand awareness while ultimately connecting back to our distributors to continue momentum for this channel.
What is your main focus as you step into this new senior role?
Christina Helwig: The continued evolution of AdvoCare, both internally and externally, is where I’ll be focusing to position us for long-term strategic growth. For example, our target audiences continue to expand. The female demographic has been a major focal point of our business, and now we want to consider how we can grow different audiences and make wellness easy and accessible for them. So many consumers are curious about how wellness can work for them, and we are poised to interact with the wellness-aware and those curious, by being open and ready to deploy effective ways to get our products to more people. How we’re going about doing that through a creative and nimble omnichannel strategy is really my number one goal and focus moving forward.
