Andrea Jung believes in empowerment

When Andrea Jung walks into a room, everything quiets down real quick. I have seen this twice in Manila, the first time in 1997 and then recently, and also twice in New York (at the UN Headquarters and at Avon’s headquarters). Everybody looks at her expecting to be enlightened — and they are never disappointed.

She cuts an inspiring and purposeful figure, never losing her femininity, striding in wearing her signature pearls, hairstyle and red lipstick. And for her recent trip to Manila, the longest-serving female CEO of a Fortune 500 company (she has been Avon’s CEO for the past 11 years) is in a relaxed cream dress.

Jung is inarguably one of the most influential and inspirational corporate women leaders in the world. She has written an important “chapter” in Avon’s history — being the first female CEO, improving the image of the company, helping raise $800 million for Avon’s social programs focused on breast cancer, which started in 1997, and since the past years, violence against women, and enlisting Hollywood stars such as Reese Witherspoon and Patrick Dempsey to help in these campaigns.    

Jung was in Manila recently for Avon’s 13th leg of the 16-city Believe World Tour, which granted $2 million to organizations in 16 cities around the world.

Up to 8,000 Avon Philippines representatives attended the World Believe Tour in Manila at the Araneta Coliseum. During the event Jung presented $60,000 (around P2.5 million) to Women’s Crisis Center, which offers intervention and support to women.

The biggest factor that has contributed to Avon’s continued success is that it has always known what it was about. “It’s 125 years of empowering women,” says Jung. “”I love the story that our founder, David H. McConnell, was very prescient. He believed that women should be economically independent; this was a very novel idea 125 years ago, this was before women could vote in the US.”

The success stories of Avon representatives changing their families’ lives for the better by being able to buy their own homes and sending their children to school are by now familiar.

This empowerment was not only for the representatives but also for the company executives. Jung herself has a great, life-changing Avon story. When she came in for her interview with then chairman Jim Preston in 1993, she noticed a plaque in his office that had four footprints — of a barefoot ape, a barefoot man, a man’s wing-tipped shoe, and then a woman’s high heel. The plaque said: “The evolution of leadership.”

Believers: Avon director for communications for Asia Pacific Louie Migne, Avon CEO Andrea Jung, Avon Philippines president and general manager Mike Gudgin, and head of communications Faith Fernandez Aranton. Jung was in Manila recently to celebrate Avon’s 125th anniversary with 8,000 Avon sales representatives

“And there were no women in 1993 holding senior jobs. I wasn’t even working for the company then and I said, ‘Do you really believe that? Because that’s a great poster.’ And Jim Preston said, ‘Avon is a company that has women selling its products (at the time 3.5 million representatives), and someday a woman should be running Avon.’”

That woman turned out to be Andrea Jung. And the plaque sits in her office her office in New York today.

Financial Independence

Jung says that for women to be truly empowered, they need to be financially independent. The stories are the same whether they’re in Manila or Shanghai or Johannesburg, she says. 

 “Two weeks ago in Argentina, we raffled off a car. The woman who won was widowed at 40 with five children. She had no economic means, she had no car so every day she would walk her children to school. And on Thursdays she volunteers at the Catholic Church with the priest. She was afraid originally to ask for the day off because she had been volunteering for the past 20 years. But the zone manager of Avon went to the priest and the priest said, ‘Go with my blessings and I will say a prayer for you to win the car.’

“She traveled on the bus for eight hours to Buenos Aires. She got the raffle ticket and said a prayer. And she won the car. She now has a car for the first time in her life. It’s a wonderful story.”

In Istanbul, Turkey, the life that made the most impact on her was that of a woman whose family lost everything in the 2003 earthquake. “In that culture her husband really didn’t want her to go to work. She said she had to disobey him but she couldn’t go out for jobs, so she did it privately during the day — she sold Avon. She made so much money and became so successful she became senior executive unit manager and with her income they bought a new home. She says that in Turkey she is the only woman she knows whose husband comes home and makes dinner for her.”

This kind of financial independence allows women practical choices when violence happens at home.

“We at Avon speak out against domestic violence because it is just unacceptable. The problem is very global, it is an issue that knows no geographic or socioeconomic boundaries,” says Jung. “Here, the Philippine National Police reported a 91 percent increase in the number of reported cases of violence against women from 2009 to 2010.”

Young voices: Andrea Jung is visibly touched as children of Avon representative sing at Araneta Coliseum where sales representatives gathered for the Manila leg of the Believe World Tour.

Jung adds this is an issue that “every Avon associate in the Philippines is very passionate about. We have been here for 33 incredible years.” Avon Philippines has raised more than P12 million since 2002. 

125-Year-Old Business Model

In a time when online businesses are taking profits from traditional businesses, Avon remains profitable and is still growing.

Jung calls Avon “the original social network — women affiliating with other women, talking about the products.”

 “We believe in the direct-selling business model,” says Jung. “We’re the largest micro lender to women in the world on any given day. There’s nearly $1 billion extended to women through our representatives. They don’t pay us until they deliver their products to their customers and are given money.”

Avon’s “high-touch and high-tech” strategy means that its 6.5 million representatives maintain their relationships with customers but at the same time are given technology opportunities to keep the direct selling channel modern.

“On the computer it’s fantastic but you can’t smell perfume online, on the screen you see 30 shades of lipstick but it’s hard to get the exact right shade. The Internet is good for replenishment, but that first product and sample, that person-to-person sale makes a lot of difference.”

The Importance of Mentors

Jung says that when she graduated from Princeton University (she was a magna cum laude) she wanted to go to the Peace Corps. “But we had no money and my parents said, ‘Well, you really need to go and get a job.’ And so I thought for many years that they were two different choices: one was getting a job and one was getting to do philanthropic work and giving back to the community. I think at Avon I get to do both. There’s a purpose in the work, there’s a social goodness. And every day the work we do for our representatives and the social things we do, it’s almost like it’s not-for-profit work, but you happen to do it for a profitable company. Not many people have that and I feel privileged.”

Jung credits her mentors to her growth as an executive and their wisdom is something she is quick to pass on to people she takes under her wing. “I had a mentor who said to me, ‘Follow your compass, not your clock.’ Follow your heart, not your head. Do work that you love, not just because of the title. If you have two people and they have equal skill sets, if you start there, and one loves the company and its people, and for the other it’s just a job, the one who will succeed is the one who loves the company.”

“I had a boss very early on in my career who had a poster behind his desk and it had a potted plant. It read, ‘Bloom where you’re planted.’ People used to come in and say, I don’t like my boss, I’m bored, I don’t like my job. And he’d say, ‘Bloom where you’re planted. You will learn more from the tough times by sticking it through. Sometimes even if you have a tough boss, you will learn more about how you don’t want to act when you become the boss someday, and those will be some of the best learning experiences.’ When I look back now, those are some of the best pieces of advice I have been given. Some people get impatient, they don’t understand that staying the course and sticking through the tough situation and succeeding on the other side are hugely important in developing leaders. It’s not always an easy path. People, sometimes, when they read my resume think it was an easy path for me, but there were crooked parts of the road, too.”