An intern view of Ben & Jerry’s

After all these articles about Ben & Jerry's, I wondered what would be the subject I was going to write about for this offline article. I must admit that my first thought was to do an ice cream tasting but, after all I have learned from this company these last weeks, I realized how important their brand image is. Consequently, I wondered if Ben & Jerry's employees also notice this importance during the day a day work and if they are trained/informed about it.

For this reason, I contacted someone working at Ben & Jerry's to ask about some questions and following, it can be found what I learned from those answers.

I must admit that I expected to get positive answers about the fact that employees were informed, but I did not expect it to be that much. As I was told, "Their commitments are always highlighted, even internally, these are programs they care about”. I was also told that Unilever (the parent company of Ben & Jerry's) is developing an internal employee application which centralizes all environmental commitments for all Unilever brands. The interviewed explained that all of this information was presented during training sessions.

I afterwards asked for some examples of daily commitment, which got me to this response: "It's difficult to be specific, it's more a state of mind within the team followes by even on a personal basis. The product manager and the brand manager are very committed to the environment on a daily basis, they often refer to it”. This also means that the brand attracts people who are already committed and intends to engage people who weren’t that committed before.

As an example, I was told about an application that was going to be launched internally, but also the fact that in the marketing team there is a special position called 'social mission manager' whose main mission is to "contribute to building a better world to lead the company in a way that actively recognizes the central role it plays in society by finding new ways to improve the quality of life of people locally, nationally and internationally”.

After all this information, I asked the interviewed what was her feeling about the company as an employee’s view, in which I got the following response: "their approach is very sincere, even during meetings, they are always proud of their products, of their sourcing".

After the conduction of this interview, I could see that all these commitments which are constantly put forward by the brand on social networks are also felt internally by their employees working at Ben & Jerry's. This tends to push people to get more involved in this approach, contributing to grow its awareness among society.

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