Haagen-Dazs became a fashion brand, not an ice cream brand

When we launched Haagen-Dazs in the UK in the early 90s we were in the middle of a recession. Not the best of times to be launching a luxury ice-cream brand. We positioned the brand as a sensual pleasure. We didn’t compare it to other ice creams, in fact we hardly mentioned the word ice cream. But at GBP3 a pot it was not only accessible, it was the most stylish pleasure you could purchase. The brand took off. Haagen-Dazs weren’t in the ice cream business, they were in the sensual pleasure business.

Sadly, over time, a succession of brand owners dragged it back to the ice cream sector. Now it’s just one of a number of ice creams fighting for attention in the supermarket freezer. Imagine where they could have taken that brand had they realized the potential of where we had positioned it - they didn’t realize we’d created a fashion brand.

The freezer cabinet is a terrible place to look for an ice-cream strategy. Everyone in it is cold, sweet and shouting about ingredients.

Häagen-Dazs escaped by behaving less like frozen pudding and more like an affordable fashion accessory for adults. Three pounds during a recession sounded extravagant beside another tub of ice cream, but rather reasonable beside an evening out or a larger luxury. Same price. Better social life.

Then comes the depressing bit: success attracts custodians. Custodians love categories because categories come with shelf plans, competitor decks and comforting graphs. Before long the sensual pleasure is discussing flavour variants with every other dessert in aisle seven. The brand becomes easier to manage and less worth managing.

Plenty of companies do this to themselves. A coffee shop thinks it competes with coffee rather than the office, the sofa or twenty quiet minutes. Collaboration software compares feature boxes while the customer is deciding whether to kill the weekly status meeting. A cinema watches other cinemas while the audience chooses between a film, a game and staying home in pants.

Positioning is not a sentence about the business you are “really in”. It is the awkward commitment to act as if that sentence were true—through price, distribution, design and what you refuse to copy. If every execution drags the offer back to its obvious shelf, the category will repossess it. Categories are efficient undertakers.