Peace, Love & Ice Cream: Analysing Ben&Jerry’s Communication Strategy
Effective alignment of brand’s values and strategies is crucial for building a brand that resonates with its audience. In today’s overabundance of different brands that all offer similar products, consumers seek authenticity and purpose beyond products, a brand’s ability to transparently communicate its messages and values becomes a defining factor. This is why it’s extremely important for those brands to develop a communication strategy that will not only successfully and openly communicate their values, but also align with their general corporate strategy.
The Communication Value Circle (CVC) framework
The CVC framework focuses on understanding the value creation of a company at the levels of corporate management and corporate communication. The central point is the corporate strategy, and all subordinate strategies, both tangible and intangible, contribute to this central strategy. The framework considers different dimensions that all together focus on creation of value. (Zerfaß and Viertmann, 2017)
The framework was developed by Dr. Ansgar Zerfass and describes the process of value creation through communication.
The inner circle addresses tangible goals (such as profitable organization, selling services/products) and intangible goals (such as corporate culture, brand value), opportunities for development (future focus), and room for maneuver (stakeholder management).
The outer circle represents the actions an organization can take to achieve these goals and realize its corporate strategy effectively.
To test the tool and learn how it works in practice, I used it to help analyze Ben & Jerry’s corporate and communication strategy as well as their alignment. Here are my findings.
Peace, Love & Ice Cream
Ben & Jerry’s is well-known for its commitment to social and environmental causes. They focus on issues such as climate change, social justice, and sustainable sourcing. The company’s mission and values are integrated into their brand identity, emphasizing the importance of giving back to the community and promoting positive change. How does this reflect in their communication?
With their slogan “Peace, Love & Ice Cream” they already perfectly capture what their mission is.
On their website, they provide a lot of information concerning their commitment to previously mentioned issues. They have a whole section called Activism, where they transparently communicate the concerns they are actively integrating in their business.
It quickly becomes clear that their corporate strategy centers on integrating social and environmental values into every aspect of their business. Their proactive approach to addressing social issues, ethical sourcing practices, and transparent communication represent their commitment to being a socially responsible and mission-driven organization.
The whole commitment to social and environmental causes is very transparent and open. The company demonstrates a huge clarity and public visibility in communicating their initiatives, making their dedication to positive change very evident to the public. They provide detailed information about their sourcing practices, environmental efforts, and social justice initiatives.
Putting the CVC into practice
According to the tool, there are normally a few main topics that a certain brand or an organization focuses on with their corporate, as well as communication strategy. Based on what I found on Ben & Jerry’s website, these are their three main topics / focus points:
Sustainability: Communicating their sustainability initiatives aligns with their environmentally conscious values and resonates with environmentally conscious consumers.
Social Justice: Their communication strategy focuses on raising awareness about social justice issues, supporting relevant campaigns, and encouraging their audience to participate in social justice movements.
Ethical Sourcing and Fair Trade: They communicate their support for small-scale farmers, fair wages, and sustainable agricultural practices. Highlighting these efforts reinforces their commitment to ethical business practices and socially responsible sourcing.
Based on their well-known social activism, sustainability efforts, and community engagement, some areas in the CVC tool seem to be particularly relevant to their communication strategy. The areas are highlighted in the picture below.
Publicity: Ben & Jerry’s actively generates positive publicity especially through their social media presence, regular blog posts, press releases, and occasional events. They use these channels to promote their social and environmental initiatives, new flavor launches, and collaborations.
Relationship and Trust: Ben & Jerry’s maintains strong relationships with their customers, suppliers, and communities. Their transparent communication about sourcing practices, ethical initiatives, and impact fosters trust among all stakeholders. Through genuine interactions, they build and sustain relationships, emphasizing their trustworthiness.
Reputation: They’ve built a reputation as a socially responsible company. Their communication efforts highlight their commitment to social and environmental causes, reinforcing their positive image.
Innovation potential: Ben & Jerry’s communication reflects their innovation potential through new flavor releases and unique collaborations. Their creativity and willingness to experiment with flavors and partnerships demonstrate their commitment to innovation in the ice cream industry.
Their social media channels feature quite some content that is related to the previously mentioned topics, although their posts are still rather product-focused and feature a lot of ice cream advertising, which is of course necessary as they are selling products.
However, they do merge some of the topics with product-focused posts, for example with limited- edition flavor announcements. Ben & Jerry’s often introduces limited-edition flavors tied to specific social causes. They use their social media platforms to announce these flavors, explaining the background and the cause associated with them. This information is also available on their website.
Another thing they tend to communicate quite often on their social media channels is ingredient source and fair trade, which they often merge with product posts.
They share a lot of educational content related to sustainability, social justice, and ethical sourcing. They create posts, infographics, and videos that educate their followers about various issues, such as climate change, racial equity, and fair trade. With their podcasts, they aim to inspire a new generation of activists and artists by providing stories from different everyday people.
Learnings: Does the framework do its job?
My outcome from this analysis is that Ben & Jerry’s corporate strategy appears to be well-aligned with their communication strategy, both emphasizing social and environmental responsibility, community engagement, ethical sourcing, and transparency. Their commitment to these values is well communicated through their channels, reinforcing their brand identity and resonating with socially conscious consumers. However, there are always areas for improvement and refinement.
Overall, the CVC tool provided a solid foundation for my analysis, enabling me to critically evaluate and understand Ben & Jerry’s communication strategy in a systematic manner. What I mostly did with the tool is systematically broke down the organization’s most important assets and aligned them with more specific actions the brand could take in order to achieve those assets/goals. This structured approach provided a clear understanding of how Ben & Jerry’s communicates its values and mission to the public as well as where there is space for improvement left.
However, I also acknowledge the complexity that analyzing an organization’s corporate and communication strategy has, and realize that there probably are additional layers to explore for a more comprehensive analysis.
