Haagen Dazs Brand

1. Company/Brand: Haagen Dazs

Haagen Dazs brand was established in 1961. Then it had only three flavours: vanilla, chocolate and coffee. Haagen Dazs soon gained reputation of the best tasting highest quality ice cream and developed a loyal customer base. This was done through word of mouth, without advertising. The brand opened its first store in 1976 in Brooklyn, New York. In 1983, the owner of Haagen Dazs brand decided to sell it to the Pillsbury Company. Since then, Haagen Dazs has become even more popular and is now available in 50 countries. Today Haagen Dazs is known as super-premium frozen dessert producer and an innovative brand, releasing new flavours every year. It operates in the high-quality frozen dessert market (mainly bucket ice cream, ice cream bars, frozen yoghurt and sorbet). Their main competitors are other luxury/premium frozen dessert brands such as Magnum, Baskin Robbins and Ben&Jerry’s as well as other brands such as Nestle, Dreyers and Breyers. Haagen Dazs also has a “philosophy”. They want to find the purest and finest ingredients in the
world and craft them into the best ice cream, sorbet, and frozen yogurt available. This philosophy is one of the reasons why Haagen Dasz has been able to acquire such brand equity and reputation.

Haagen Dazs offers more than 50 products with a wide variety of flavours within each product line. For example, in their ice cream product line one can find all kinds of flavours: Chocolate, Chocolate Chip, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Chocolate Peanut Butter, Coffee, Vanilla, Cookies & Cream, Mango, and Cherry Vanilla among many others.

Broadly speaking, Haagen Dazs has always tried to target the adult consumers of frozen dessert who are willing (and able) to spend money on luxurious super-premium ice cream. Haagen Dazs does this by positioning themselves as a high-price/high-quality ice cream. The packaging they use for their frozen desserts speaks for itself. The colours are luxurious and sophisticated; mainly cold colours. This choice of colours portrays elegance and appeals to their target segments.

Haagen Dazs targets two broad groups of customers. The first target group are adults who are financially independent and who usually tend to pay more for sophisticated ice cream with hand-picked ingredients. The second target group is also made up of adults. However, this group is health conscious. They show interest in dessert, while they are looking for products with natural ingredients and low-fat substitutes. Haagen Dazs fulfils this criterion by providing ice cream with dark chocolate from Belgium and hand-picked vanilla beans from Madagascar.

The Haagen Dazs marketing team has been successful at targeting certain segments of frozen dessert consumers. Specifically, Haagen Dazs has three target segments. The first pillar of segmentation for Haagen Dazs is demographic segmentation. Apart from focusing on adults with high income, they narrow it down to couples sometimes. They approach couples by associating the brand with romantic experiences. For example, Haagen Dazs released an advertisement in 2010 named “Haagen Dazs Summer Romance No. 596” which shows a young security guard and a young woman at the beginning of a relationship. In this particular advertisement Haagen Dazs established a link between a romantic relationship between young couples and a strawberry flavoured ice cream.