Unilever and ben and jerry's takeover success

At first, aside from some public grumbling from Cohen and Greenfield about big corporations, not much changed at Ben & Jerry’s. Then, in early 2001, a longtime Unilever executive, Yves Couette, was selected to take over as the new Ben & Jerry’s CEO (what employees called chief euphoria officer). When Couette heard his company had bought Ben & Jerry’s, he said, “My first reaction was, they are out of their minds.”4 Yet, once appointed to run the business, Couette quickly adopted the casual attire and accepted employee playfulness. When he sent a group of managers off-site for a day for one of Unilever’s standard branding exercises, the managers returned with an ice-cream-cone-shaped drawing that said, “good for the belly and soul.”5 When Couette wanted Ben & Jerry’s anti-big-business employees to learn more about

3 James E. Austin and Herman B. Leonard, “Can the Virtuous Mouse and the Wealthy Elephant Live Happily

Ever After?,” California Management Review, November 1, 2008, 80. 4 Patrick Kiger, “Corporate Crunch,” Workforce Management 84, no. 4 (April 2005), 35. 5 Kiger.

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-3- UV5663 financial issues, he hired a consultant who taught the concepts playfully: Participants had to operate their own lemonade stands.

Ben & Jerry’s business seemed to thrive under the arrangement. Between 2001 and 2004,

sales reached $417.9 million, operating margins tripled, and operations expanded into 13 new countries.6 Not everyone was surprised by the success, given Unilever’s history of buying big- name brands and driving up their bottom lines. Indeed, there had been inefficiencies in Ben & Jerry’s production and distribution, and Unilever used its hefty manufacturing and distribution systems to save money and use less energy.7 To avoid duplication and increase efficiencies, it employed some of its resources from other ice cream production operations, and for that reason, 69 Ben & Jerry’s legacy employees were let go, and two plants were closed. All in all, though, sales and profits surpassed Unilever’s expectations—Ben & Jerry’s had the largest sales growth of any of Unilever’s businesses.8

Flavour with a U In 2004, Couette was replaced by Walt Freese, who had been Ben & Jerry’s chief

marketing officer since 2001, and who described his view of the merger like this:

The company [Ben & Jerry’s] brought its super-premium products to the Unilever business portfolio, but perhaps more importantly, Ben & Jerry’s brought a deep sense of values-led decision making and progressive vision that would complement and push Unilever into new areas of social, environmental, and economic commitment. Unilever clearly understood and publicly stated that it believed much of the success of the Ben & Jerry’s brand was based on its connections to “basic human values.”9 For the next four years, Freese’s team maintained success, and by 2008, Ben & Jerry’s

held 36% of the ice cream market share, second behind Häagen-Dazs’s 44%10—continuing to fulfill merger expectations. And Unilever kept its promise to support the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, having contributed $10 million to it over the years, as well as having donated an undisclosed (the company used the word significant) amount of product to community groups and nonprofits in Vermont and the United States.11 “I was skeptical about this supposed

6 Kiger, 32 and Ruth Mortimer, “A Big Dollop of Investment,” Brand Strategy, April 2005, 8. 7 Austin and Leonard, 80, 89. 8 Austin and Leonard, 82. 9 Austin and Leonard, 81. 10 “Ben & Jerry’s SWOT,” Marketingteacher.com, http://www.marketingteacher.com/swot/ben-and-jerrys-

swot.html (accessed August 4, 2011). 11 Austin and Leonard, 85.

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-4- UV5663 ‘transport of values’ from Ben & Jerry’s to Unilever, but it has happened to some degree,” Jerry Greenfield said.12