When Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were starting their homemade ice cream business in Vermont in the late Seventies, they knew they wanted to do something different. “We wanted what we called a community-based business,” Cohen said at South by Southwest’s How to Win Friends and Overthrow Systems panel Friday morning. For Cohen and Greenfield, this meant catering to the average person, not big business stakeholders.
The pair soon decided that the best way to use their business model to improve the quality of life for their customers “was to make the community owners of Ben & Jerry’s,” Cohen said. In 1984, the ice cream company became Vermont’s first public stock company and went public nationally a year later. In honor of the success, the owners established the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation in 1985, which gives 7.5% of company pre-tax dollars to community philanthropy projects.
The company’s three-part social, product, and financial mission model reflects its cultural commitments, making their business “more than just making ice cream and making money,” Cohen explained. “We were so adamant that the three were equal and mutually interdependent that our mission statement is written out horizontally so that one doesn’t rank higher than the other.”
Cohen’s and Greenfield’s decision to center cultural campaigns and creative messaging in their business launched a new era of social-cultural movements that forever distinguished the brand’s unique identity, said cultural theorist and session moderator Doug Cameron, who co-authored the book, Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands. The company’s cultural model for social success is one that every individual and business can employ to grow their impact and spark movements, he said.
The first step is advancing innovative ideology, where companies introduce new ways of solving meaningful societal challenges. By rejecting the dominant belief that a business’s primary responsibility is to maximize shareholder profits, Ben & Jerry’s provided a countermovement to traditional business ideology. Its ice cream flavor, Cherry Garcia, named after the late great Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, emerged from a consumer suggestion letter that Cohen and Greenfield decided to honor, despite board pushback. It’s now one of the company’s best-selling flavors.
A culturally conscious business must also actively respond to historical societal tension. One of Ben & Jerry’s creative campaigns, “What’s the Doughboy Afraid Of,” took on Pillsbury to draw awareness to conglomerates’ threat to local businesses – one example of the business responding to real-world macro-tensions while also raising brand awareness. The creation of its Rainforest Crunch flavor using Amazon-grown Brazil nuts was intended to call attention to the need for sustainable rainforest harvesting practices, allowing the company to make money while supporting significant movements.
The third and fourth steps involve using creative visual marketing to innovatively tell a story and stage symbolic challenges. The duo did this by adding messaging to their pints and products to increase impact. “Food is a medium, and packaging carries activism and messages” that are more approachable than traditional campaigns, Cameron said. Ben & Jerry’s first executed this approach through their Peace Pops packaging that listed messages of togetherness during the Cold War. Cohen explained that this approach, while not popular with the board, is at the heart of Ben & Jerry’s mission – something that he is unwilling to compromise on.
Since then, the brand has publicly shared their progressive views on everything from peace activism, anti-war movements, economic justice, and the right to free speech. They are currently promoting their “Free Ben & Jerry’s” campaign to take back the company after a demerger put them under the umbrella of Magnum Ice Cream Company.
Cohen also took a chance to bring awareness to his new “Up in Arms” campaign that calls out extreme government military spending while at SXSW. And he didn’t hold back. Much to the audience’s surprise, he took a real chainsaw to a model of the Pentagon dawning a DOPE (Department of Pentagon Excess) hat, mocking Elon Musk’s departmental spending cut video.
“In Elon Musk’s backyard, I’m going to pick up where DOGE left off,” he said, as fake dollar bills erupted from the model structure. The enthusiastic cheers from the audience demonstrated the concept of symbolic messaging and movement building in action, deep in the heart of Texas.
When asked what the average person can do to support ethical companies and build movements in a similar fashion as what Ben & Jerry’s has built over the last half-century, Cohen said that people need to go out into the world and stand up for what they believe in.
“It’s not enough to be an informed citizen,” he said. Consumers may be the most powerful actors, but change still requires action. Coming from the ice cream man himself, “nothing is near as powerful as voting with your feet and voting with your dollars.”
