Marketing promotional strategies Essay

For this task I have chosen to write about Ben and Jerrys and Haagen-Dazs ice cream. These are two rival brands at the top end of the market. I decided to write about ice cream because it is very popular and there is lots of information available about them. They also both have good marketing and promotional strategies. I chose to write about Haagen-Dazs, as it is the best known ice cream. It is the number one super premium ice cream with 43 % of the market share. It is quite expensive as it is about  £5 for a carton on the ice cream but it is very nice. It is made with natural ingredients and its flavours are Chocolate, Butter Pecan and Cherry Vanilla. It was first made over 40 years ago. Haagen-Dazs uses the finest and purest ingredients. Ben and Jerrys is also at the top end of the market but it is a newer brand as it was first made in 1978. It has 39% of the market share and is the number two brand. It costs a little bit less than Haagen-Dazs as well. The price is still quite expensive though as all the products used are bought from minority and disadvantaged workers. It has a more fun image and has flavours such as Phish Food, Berry Nice and Cherry Garcia. It is aimed more towards young people than Haagen-Dazs is. It is aimed at young men and women in their teens, twenties and thirties with a high disposable income. Although these products are both at the top end of the market and are luxury ice creams they have very different approaches to their marketing and promotional strategies. Ben and Jerrys is marketed as a fun brand. It aims to try and attract younger people than Haagen-Dazs. This is shown by the names of its ice cream flavours and also by the design of the packet. Haagen-Dazs has a more sophisticated image and it has a more grown-up carton. It is aimed more towards older people, for example, people in their late 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. Marketing Promotional Strategies Marketing Mix and Promotion has four main aims. It is known as AIDA. It sums up the purpose of communication with customers through promotions. A companies Unique Selling Point (USP) is what they use to make them different to other companies who are selling the same things as them. Ben and Jerrys have got a laid back image but they also have a social awareness. When Ben and Jerry first started their company, they started the concept of giving back to the community as a whole. They make sure that the milk they use is bought from Vermont farmers and they buy the brownies they use in some of their ice creams from disadvantaged workers. They also give 7.5% of their profit away to help social and environmental causes. This is their Unique Selling Point. Haagen-Dazs USP is that they are an ice cream aimed at adults that uses only the finest ingredients. They market themselves as the ultimate in luxury and extravagance. There are lots of different types of media that can be used to advertise products. These are the mass media: television, radio, cinema and the internet. There is also billboards, magazines, planes and product placement. Local media can also be used and this is notice boards, shop windows and public places. These influence buyer behaviour by persuading them to buy the product they are advertising. Haagen-Dazs has a lot of advertising. They advertise at cinemas and also on the television. They also have magazine and billboard advertisements. They advertise themselves as being a luxury ice cream and have started a new advertising campaign – â€Å"Made for Movies†. This is going along with a special offer at Blockbuster videos where they offer free video rentals. When Haagen-Dazs first started in England they had a word of mouth campaign to make them seem very credible. They had marketed it as an upmarket product and at first it was only sold in upmarket shops. They ran advertisements in magazines like Vogue in order to attract the right sort of audience they wanted. Haagen-Dazs used AIDA to drip feed information in order to get peoples attention. Most people wouldn’t be able to buy it at first though because they didn’t shop at the right shops and it was expensive but after a while they started selling it at lots of shops. People bought Haagen-Dazs because they wanted to see what all the fuss was about and if it really was as good as other people said. Ben and Jerrys also advertise their products but not as much as Haagen-Dazs. They do not have any television advertising at the moment; neither do they have any magazine adverts. They have a lot of promotional evens however, such as buses that go round universities and offer free tasting days. Ben and Jerrys is often bringing out new flavours of ice cream and often has a â€Å"Flavour of the Month† They also stop making flavours that are not selling well. This is so customers do not get bored of the same thing. They advertise these new flavours in magazines and on billboards and people are keen to try what these new flavours taste like. They also advertise that they give a percentage of their profits to charity and the Ben and Jerry Foundation and this is used to gain customers. Both Ben and Jerrys and Haagen-Dazs have an upmarket image and at the moment they are the only two ice-cream brands to have this image. People would rather buy the more expensive brand and get the image that goes with it than buy a cheaper ice-cream which tastes just as good because they don’t get the image that is associated with it.