Ben & Jerry's by Fred Lager

Author:Fred Lager [Lager, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78064-5
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

In August we put up a billboard on Route 128, the main arterial road around Boston. It featured a pint of our ice cream being squeezed by two white, pudgy hands that were seemingly bursting through the billboard from behind. Howie warned us off the original headline, “Don’t Let Pillsbury’s $$$ Strangle Ben & Jerry’s,” and we settled instead on “Don’t Let Pillsbury Put the Squeeze on Ben & Jerry’s.” Howie also told us we’d be pushing our luck if we put extensions on the billboard so the Doughboy’s pudgy little feet extended out the bottom and his white chef’s hat extended over the top. Howie had bought into the Doughboy campaign as an integral part of our overall legal strategy, and he rarely took issue with any of our antics. When he said we had gone too far, we knew we were over the line, and not just getting conservative legal advice from someone intent on covering his ass.

At the same time that the billboard was up, we ran the same ad copy on the back of the mass transit buses in Boston. And in one of Ben’s grander strokes, he hired a plane to tow the “What’s the Doughboy Afraid Of?” message, along with the 800 number, over Foxboro Stadium during a Boston College football game.

The ad in Rolling Stone, the billboard, and the airplane all helped keep the media interested in the story. While they did successfully carry our message to the general public, their real value was in the free Publicity they helped generate.

Feature articles on our plight appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The Sunday Boston Globe did a cover story in its magazine section entitled “New England’s Own Cold War.” All of these articles were sent out on the wire services and picked up by other major daily newspapers throughout the country. Even the trade publication for the imprinted novelty business wrote a major piece attributing our campaign’s success to the buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers we were using.

About four hundred Doughboy kits were going out every week, and we regularly received copies of letters that our customers had sent to Pillsbury. One kid organized his friends into Doughboy Busters, who canvassed their neighborhood and signed up supporters. I sent William Spoor a copy of that letter, along with a note informing him that he was alienating the youth of America. “Why not think it over and repent?” I suggested.

We also received a copy of a letter that Charlie Pillsbury had sent to his father, George, who happened to be a member of Pillsbury’s board of directors. Charlie had already written on our behalf to the FTC and Bill Spoor, but told his dad that he was looking forward to hearing the company’s side of the story when he was home for Christmas.

After we filed our complaint, Häagen-Dazs, as might have been expected, countersued, alleging abuse of process. By fall, a schedule that called for

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.