Ceci n'est pas un blog

Back in late 2001 I went to a presentation by some Norwegian distributors of the Nikken products. Afterwards I did quite a bit of research and wrote about what I found. First only in Norwegian but then a German guy asked me if I could translate it, so I did.

I could write a whole lot about the reactions I've gotten on that paper, but instead I'll write shortly about this lawsuit I was told about.

I got an email about some turmoil in France. It seems that Nikken has gotten rid of some of the most successful French distributors. This small group of people have worked for years, and made around €500.000 a year in comission (that's around US$540.000).

The story goes like this: a Swiss distributor didn't follow the rules and got kicked out. He then restarted under a different name, something pointed out by other distributors. Nikken didn't seem to have a problem at all with it which of course upset the other distributors and it ended up with Nikken cancelling the long-time distributors, thereby defending the one who didn't follow the rules. Lawyers is on the case.

As I reported earlier there was a class action lawsuit in the US, but information about that has since been removed from the web. My attempts at contacting the law firm has gotten no replies. In both Norway and Sweden there has been cases of sucessful network marketing distributors being thrown out (allegedly because they did something wrong), and the lawsuit in Sweden was settled out of court (the outcome of the lawsuit in Norway is yet to be determined).

Is this the new marketing idea, to create a MLM company, let people do lots of work, and then throw them out if they get too good at it?

Yesterday was a fun day. I got up, checked my email, and found this interesting one from somebody called "Compliance". Behind that name you'll find Nikken UK Ltd's Compliance Department, and they wanted to tell me that I wasn't allowed to market Nikken's products on the internet. If you can read Swedish the complete email is found in Jarle's blog entry about it since he's actually the one supposed to get it.

I had a slight problem understanding why they thought my name was Jarle and how on earth "My Nikken Encounter" could be called "marketing Nikken's products". Not only were they referring to an earlier entry in Jarle's blog, but they also referred to my writeup. And they asked me to remove all information I've written about Nikken by February 11.

I forwarded a copy of it to Jarle since he was obviously an intended recipient, and then I wrote a reply to Nikken telling them that I wasn't Jarle, that what I had written can hardly be called "marketing", and that they could mail me back with any specific errors in what I have written.

I got a reply before the end of the day explaining that the Cease & Desist email was meant to be to Jarle. They didn't say they were sorry they had asked me to remove all my writings and they didn't say they were sorry they hadn't researched a bit more and figured out who I am. I'm quite happy that I never intended to comply to their request since if I did, all my writings would now have been removed even though they never intended to ask me to do that.

As I'm a bit delayed in writing about this it's been mentioned in other blogs as well. Jarle has of course got Nikken Bullies with a few comments. It's also mentioned by Anders Jacobsen, Bob, Remco, Arve and Elf.

[Update 2004-01-29: Added link to Elf's blog]

As I mentioned yesterday, Nikken emailed Jarle D. Bergersen and me asking us to remove all our writings about Nikken by February 11.

Their response to my reply was seemingly that they were not concerned with my writings at all, although they did not state it specifically. Instead they want two comments to Jarle's entry Nikken in his Norwegian blog deleted. He's currently keeping his English blog updated with how the case develops, read the latest about it in his Nikken Update.

I'll be sending Nikken's Compliance department another email today asking them to dismiss the cease & desist request in my case, and once I get a reply I'll update the blog.