Aug
19
How Haagen Dazs Ruined It For Ben and Jerry’s, or How To Safely Ignore Your Competition
As far as I’m concerned, Haagen Dazs and Ben and Jerry’s are pretty much the same. Sure, the external stuff differs, but at the end of the day, it’s very good, very expensive ice cream. Even the packaging is the same.
When I want HD/B&J, I go to the store and see which one is on sale. If neither is on sale, I either don’t buy it, or I buy the one that looks tastiest to me on the day. Up until the other day, I had absolutely no loyalty one way or the other.
So Jamie goes to the store and buys groceries. He comes home with two tubs of B&J. (Tragically, he also brought home other stuff. Bastard.) We share one that night, and it’s lovely. Exactly what you want in horribly overpriced ice cream.
The next day, a client pinged me to let me know they’d be late for a consultation. I picked up Oprah Magazine and started leafing through to pass the few minutes before my call. And that’s when It Happened. I see an ad for Haagen Dazs Five.
Here’s the idea. Haagen Dazs Five has five ingredients. Milk, Cream, Sugar, Eggs, and whatever ingredient it takes to make the flavor. Mint, say. Or brown sugar.
I find this really cool (some might say remarkable) and got to talking about it to Jamie later. He says, “What are the five ingredients?” And we start discussing. I can’t remember if it’s egg yolk or just egg. We discuss the likelihood of both. We end up in a 15 minute discussion of the ingredients of a brand of ice cream we have never tried.
(Note: this is also an example of interruption advertising working just fine, thankyouverymuch. It’s not that interruption advertising doesn’t work. It’s that BAD interruption marketing doesn’t work. But that’s another post.)
I go to the freezer some time after that and open the other container of B&J. I hop in the bath with my ice cream and the first thing I do is look at the ingredients:
Cream, skim milk, liquid sugar, water, sugar, reduced lactose sweetened condensed milk, frozen egg yolk mix, cashews, glucose, cocunut oil, butter, milk fat, cocoa, milk, natural flavour, guar gum, soy lecithin, pectin, salt, sodium bicarbonate, vanilla extract, carrageenan.
They didn’t do anything wrong. They didn’t do anything they hadn’t been doing the whole time. But now I think that B&J is pumping my ice cream full of shit I don’t want or need.
Haagen Dazs changed the game.
We can get in a big discussion about target markets and how B&J might not really care what I think and branding and demographics and whatever the hell else marketers like to argue about when they don’t want to admit to thinking, “Oh, fuck.” But at the end of the day, your business is made up of individual people like me, deciding if they want to buy your shit or not.
B&J could have fixed this before this happened by making me loyal. They could have made it so I just didn’t care what Haagen Dazs did because I don’t buy Haagen Dazs. They could’ve told me a story about their founder giving free ice cream to orphans or about how Mike in their accounting department got his job by dressing up like a cashew and begging or given me the email address where we could send congratulations to their receptionist who’s about to have her first baby.
Make me like you and it doesn’t matter what the other guy does.
Mmmm, now Haagen Dazs can be the real ice cream I kind of want but don’t buy because I don’t want to consume actual refined sugar. I wonder if one of those five ingredients I can daydream about can be COOKIE DOUGH… uh, probably not. :D
Silly Ben & Jerry’s! Get in the game!
Must you talk about ice cream when I’m dieting? Oh, the pain!
I so love Haagen-Dazs.
Well, that sounds dangerous. The longer ice cream ingredients-lists have been getting, the less ice cream I’ve been buying. Now I’ll have to wear blinders walking past the freezer section so I don’t find out that’s available here. Maybe blinders can be a new fashion statement?
Actually, B&J did address this in their own way by saying at (close to) their inception that they learned how to make ice cream through Penn State’s correspondence course in ice cream making (how you send in your lab results for evaluation I have no idea). Anyway, there are many, many thousands of loyal Penn Staters who fondly remember slurping ice cream from PSU’s Creamery. Just the thought that we can get a reminder of its creamy lusciousness in a pint of B&J without traveling to the center of Pennsylvania is enough to keep us in the fold.
Haagen-Dazs? Meh.
I think B&J will be ok because they have a cult-like following. I watched a documentary about it a few weeks ago. I don’t know why I must torture myself since I rarely eat ice cream, but anyway!
They had people touring the factory and talked about the Penn Staters that Liz mentions. Those people are pretty darn enthusiastic about their ice cream.
I also think they do a good job keeping interest by introducing new funky flavors that nobody else carries. Cherry Garcia… that’s awesome branding right there.
Ah, our generation gap is showing. :) Because both ice creams laid their groundwork ads and branding in the ’80s — and have kind of flip-flopped, apparently.
Back then, Ben & Jerry’s was all about the two hippie guys in Vermont who started it all — Ben and Jerry.
You’d see their pictures on stuff. They looked like hippies with their beards and long hair. And they had a black and white cow on the packages, along with flowery flower power art work.
They’d come up with these wacky flavors that no one else had and gave them clever groovy ’60s names, like “Cherry Garcia.” When they came out with a new flavor, it was an event. They did a lot of novelties back then. Back in the day, Cherry Garcia only came on a stick with a hard chocolate coating, kind of like an Eskimo pie.
Back in the ’80s, Haagen Daz was all about status. No peace and love hippies here. HD was supposed to be the epitome of gourmet ice cream. The richest, the most expensive. Eat it with a silver spoon. If you need to ask how much it costs, it’s not for you anyway.
That HD is going for the “five flavors – all natural – that’s it” rep is kind of a Freaky Friday flip flop. Because B&J used to be all about the natural, flowers and cows thing going.
I do think I recall hearing where Ben & Jerry sold their company to a big corporate America behemoth a few years back. That might explain a lot. No one knows how to blow a good established small brand like a big company. But I can’t blame the boys for cashing in.
Anyway – I also have a 1980s trivia question. Another gourmet ice cream tried to move in on the HD status turf back then. This one’s not around anymore. This brand started with a “Pf,” and the name was so complicated that they even ran an ad campaign joking about the long, unpronounceable name. That may explain a lot about that brand’s disappearance, too.
Lots of thought provoking stuff here, for sure (and now, I’m hungry too – I hate you, if I were a super villain, ice cream would be my secret weakness… well, I am a super villain, but don’t tell anyone…)
My question would be – does Ben & Jerry’s know about this (I would assume they do, by now), and my second question would be, what the frak are they doing about it???
This is likely to happen to anyone, the important thing is, what the hell are you going to do about it?
I mean, if someone comes along and creates “TinyBiz Five” where they have just five components that gives what IttyBiz does, I know you’d have a plan whipped up PDQ!
Breyers has had me for a while, exactly because of the ingredients.
Lots of companies probably spent 30 years telling themselves that the ingredients don’t matter, because nobody reads that anyway. Until suddenly they do. Oh shit, quality matters.
@Rhonda, thanks so much. Now I’ve got that trivia question stuck in my head. Because I *almost* remember the name of it. Aarggh!
“Make me like you and it doesn’t matter what the other guy does.”
I;ve never thought of it before, but this must be true! I’m a big Ben & Jerry’s fan, and all through reading your article here I was thinking “So what about HD, they are not nearly as fun.”. Guess it works! I don’t care about HD’s 5, because I already like B&J waaaaay more. ;)
Yes but Haagen Daz’s marketing is misleading. They claim to have 5 ingredients, one of which is the flavor. Well, if that flavor is a cookie or a candy, then that “one” flavoring includes a large number of ingredients. It doesn’t matter how pure your ice cream is, if you add crumbled oreos or Heath bars to it, you are adding a lot of extra stuff.
For example, here’s the ingredients in Haagen Daz’s Cookes & Cream: Cream, Skim Milk, Sugar, Chocolate Cookie Pieces (Flour, Sugar, Coconut Oil, Cocoa Processed With Alkali, Corn Syrup, Baking Soda, Chocolate Liquor, Salt) Egg Yolks, Natural Vanilla.
About their founder giving free ice cream to orphans . . .
The thing about B&J is that they actually do, you know, give ice cream to orphans. And a whole bunch of other great volunteer work. One of the five top navigation buttons on their website is ACTIVISM. Which in its turn is broken down into three different kinds of activism. These are dudes who make ice cream who aren’t afraid to proclaim that they want to stop war and economic hardship. They slap the wrist of big government harder than I have seen many a congressman do. And for fuck’s sake, they MAKE ICE CREAM. It’s not like any of this was obligatory.
HD going “natural” is a joke. Are their containers recyclable? No they are not. Do they buy from one, co-op owned creamery locally to supply the dairy for their ice cream? Um, no. No they don’t. Do they pledge on every single pint to keep their dairy cows free of dangerous hormones? Fail yet again. Are they members of the Fair Trade movement so that their coffee and chocolate and vanilla don’t exploit people in third-world countries? EPIC fail.
Sorry, HD. It’s going to take a lot more than this five-ingredient thing to make me go for it. For one thing, guarantee that all those five ingredients aren’t harming the planet. For B&J, the dairy is local and hormone free, the eggs are from cage-free chickens, and the main ingredients, like chocolate, aren’t screwing over some poor farmer who can’t get a fair price for spending hours in the baking sun picking the damn cacao beans.
If HD is doing the same, their website says nary a word about it.
Fuck their five ingredients. With B&J, at least I know they actually think about the impact of every ingredient they use. And I know that the proceeds go to lots of great environmental causes, which is why their flavors have those wacky names, so you can keep ‘em straight. Phish Food goes to environmental efforts for a Vermont watershed. Peach Cobbler gives to Farm Aid. Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream proceeds go to giving food and medical assistance to disadvantaged children.
Okay, so maybe the owner isn’t giving away free ice cream to disadvantaged children. But something tells me that food and medical assistance might be, you know. Better.
Of course, all of this only makes Naomi’s point that a good marketing campaign can make you think that one brand is better when it is in fact a corporate suckhole.
The real kicker is, the HD ice cream that is “Five” – every single one of those flavors – *already* had only five ingredients.
I’ve been a ridiculous fan of the Coffee ice cream for years, and it’s always been just five ingredients. Now they’re capitalizing on the stuff they’ve always had. Good move! (;
I’m a lifelong Breyer’s fan, precisely because they were genuinely all-natural on my fave flavor (mint chocolate chip for the curious mind).
But then I started to notice my beloved Breyer’s was tasting gummy — a quality I despised and avoided in all other brands. So I looked on the side and behold! not all-natural anymore. It had gone the unpronouncable ingredient route.
So when I saw the new HD5 ads, I thought, “Ooh! Just like Breyer’s *used* to be!” Yet I’m still buying Breyer’s. It’s the ice cream of my childhood — what my mother espoused as the best version of a ‘bad for you’ food. Breyer’s accomplished what B&J failed to do: assured my loyalty.
But surprise surprise to me, it turns out it’s not because of the all-natural claim I’ve always felt so self-righteous about. It’s just good ol’ fashioned positive association. And that’s something that no slick ad campaign from HD will be able to undo anytime soon for me.
Regular Haagen Dazs also just has 5 ingredients. It’s purely rebranding.
Ben and Jerry’s has the “conscious consumer” element to it though, with the non rBGH cows they get their dairy from, etc. allowing the consumer to pretend like they are doing something good for the Earth by eating a tub of ice cream on the couch, listening to String Cheese Incident.
Dude. Talking about ice cream, has anyone seen those DQ Girl Scouts Cookie blizzards? I don’t care how expensive those suckers are, I want one.
I am loyal to the Girl Scouts, so even though DQ overprices their lame not-even-real-ice-cream ice cream, I will buy it now. Until the girl scouts go to McDonalds or something.
RhondaL said everything I wanted to say, only much more eloquently (I was thinking, oh, you are a young one that you lump together those two brands in your mind), and it was Unilever (British and Dutch multinational conglomerate) who bought Ben & Jerry’s and started screwing around with their ingredients list.
Ben & Jerry’s actually do give out quite a lot of free ice cream, or at least they used to, not sure if Unilever’s carrying on the tradition, and many of their Scoop Shops are owned and run in partnership with charities as a way for the charity to make money. Not sure about orphans, but there are two books about Ben & Jerry’s, and one is all about their totally inspiring business practices, Double Dip I think it’s called? It’s a good read, esp. from a marketing angle.
I think the 80s trivia ice cream was something like Pfafzengruber with an umlaut over the u? My Google skills are weak at best, but I remember the container in my step-father’s freezer.
Sarah, get the Keebler Grasshoppers. Same exact thing as Thin Mint, but available all year, and cheaper.
Oh … then put a bottle of peppermint schnapps. Add a shot to a glass of chocolate milk. Same taste, no crunch.
You mean people have to mix stuff together to make ice cream? It doesn’t grow on an ice cream tree?
Wow!
That’s why I follow Naomi, she is just chock full of informative stuff. I suspect she is chock full of some other stuff as well, but let’s not go there for now.
Anyway, until they come out with some sugar free ice cream for us diabetic people, it’s just all about eating frozen fat.
I’m heading to the California State Fair on Friday where they offer truly American treats like deep fried Twinkies and for the first time, chocolate covered BACON. I’m not eating any of that crap. Just going to ride on one of the four rides from Michael Jackson’s Neverland.
Maybe they will have sugar free ice cream there. You never know!
The first thing I thought of when I saw one of those HD ads? Breyer’s ice cream. Remember the commercials they used to have? With cute kids trying to read the ingredient labels on the competitors, and then breezing through “Cream, Sugar, Strawberries”
Ahh, Haagen Dazs totally picked up on the “return to the simpler life movement” or so I call it. When the stock market tanked and all those complex equations that were developed to show “returns” on our investments proved fallacious, we quickly turned back to the cave and the basics. Right, we understand milk? Middle America. Sugar? Cold lemonade on grandma’s porch. It’s all so basic.
Michael Pollan’s books, including In Defense of Food, where he advises, “eat food. not too much. mostly plants,” tug on our prelapsarian heartstrings. It’s wildly popular right now and for good reason.
HD made you loyal by bringing you back to day 1. Gotta go defrost the cream. . .
I like the idea that I can “make me like you.” According to my overall theory of people, we can’t make anyone do anything. We can only influence people if they are open to being influenced.
But how do you find the open people? It seems they must find you, and you have to be ready with the stuff they are going to love you for.
Otherwise, they’re just another visitor.
And then there was a young Naomi who made blue vanilla cherry ice cream. It was good.
A young Naomi who made blue vanilla cherry ~ Dad. I’m getting teary eyed. How sweet.
B&J’s full name was always Ben & Jerry’s Homemade. They were the hippie guys, in Vermont, with cows, tree-hugging activists. I never took their tour when I lived in Vermont (why oh why?) I do remember they had create your own flavor and if we like it we’ll make it contests. The general store had a case of their factory seconds, super cheap, and all the money went to the local fund-raising project of choice. Factory seconds, they warned, meant you could either end up with nearly all ice cream, nearly all fixings, or something that just didn’t meet their Quality Standards. Who cared, it was always good.
Now if I want to indulge it’s dairy free, made with coconut milk and gluten free chocolate chip cookie dough. How sad is that?
Oops, that should have read “put a bottle of peppermint schnapps in the freezer”.
Great example via story, Naomi. B&J does in fact drill home a message and cultivate loyalty, but I suppose where they are deficient is in getting that message out there and across. I’m familiar from business school about how Green Green Green the company is (and have been to VT and on the factory tour) and all the activism and fair trade and the like (like others have mentioned)….but I guess they don’t do a lot of print or tv ads to that point. Maybe they should~
Like many others, first thing I thought of when reading this post were the old Breyer’s adverts. HD is catching to the idea of promoting what they already do. LOL.
RE: B&J … last time I went on the tour in Waitsfield, VT (yes, I’ve gone several times … when you live in VT and have family who are addicted to ice cream, it’s hard not to), I remember them showing a (then) new individual serving size that was being marketing in Japan. A woman in the tour group piped up and said, “But I thought that the containers we get already ARE single serving!”
Sadly, she was serious.
Still, we all laughed.
As for me and mine, we make our ice cream. And yes, it DOES taste better!
Hey, @Drew Kime and everyone — I found it! The ’80s competitor against Haagen Daz in the gourmet ice cream market was … FRUSEN GLADJE!!!
Now – how did I finally find it? (Let’s forget that I thought the name started with a Ph or Pf.)
I looked up Haagen Daz on Wikipedia to find the company’s competitor. I guess that also means that you and your competitors are linked, for good or ill.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry for Frusen Gladje, which has some info about its marketing – and eventual lack thereof:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frusen_Gl%C3%A4dj%C3%A9
Did anyone else have to eat “ice-milk” growing up?
It was with great triumph that I bought whole milk and *real* ice cream when I moved out of the parental home.
Yep, I remember ice-milk. I also drank 2% milk, cut half-and-half with powdered milk. Didn’t know what whole milk tasted like until I was on my own for several years.
Drew, you’re saving me money AND from having to interpret what you meant, all in one fail swoop? Man, that’s rad. (I’m bringing back the word rad just for you.)
Sarah, good luck with that. I tried bringing back “groovy” for a couple of years, and got a little traction. I’ve been working on “boss” for the last five years with no luck at all.
Holy crap, guys. This one is SO getting a follow up post.
Note to bloggers: If you want to get people talking, make it about ice cream.
THANK YOU! A LOT!
Not sure about eating ice cream in the bathtub but the sentence “Make me like you and it doesn’t matter what the other guy does” really had an impact on me. That is a great one line strategy and reminder of what I should be focusing on when I write copy.
The flavors I’ve tried so far of Five (Ginger and Brown Sugar) have just simply blown every other ice cream out of the water. I have a mean sweet tooth, so I’ve tried nearly everything out there. I think that’s what really wins it- good clean flavors that are not a hodgepodge of fudgepeanutbuttercupcakebananawithsprinkles, but an adult ice cream for people who enjoy simple yet complex tastes.
Haagen Dazs has also had those contests for special flavors, which was a genius idea.
B&J are more interested in politics than in making ice cream. If you go on the tour, it’s not very interesting about ice cream, but it tells you a lot about Ben and Jerry. But I care about how the stuff tastes, not that the owner digs Al Gore.