Ben & Jerry’s online trends

With the help of the website "Digimind", an online tool that allows the monitoring of different social networks and competitive intelligence, the competitive position and trends related to the Ben and Jerry's brand have been evaluated over a period of the last two years.

TREND

When analysing trends in English on the internet it can be seen that, from November 2019 to the present, there have been 3 peaks of mentions about the Ben and Jerry's brand that exceeded 200k: April 2020, June 2020 and July 2021. Generally, the spikes are related to political events that occurred in that same time period and when the company positioned itself publicly or due to collaborations with other brands.

The most recent peak, and also the one with the fewest mentions, was the July 2021 peak, with 240,261 mentions. This peak is directly related to the conflict that took place between Israel and Palestine. You can read more about Ben and Jerry's social activism in the Palestine conflict and other causes in the post: "Ben and Jerry's sweet protest in support of human rights".

In April 2020, the company garnered a total of 364,691 mentions on the internet related to its collaboration with the multinational company Nike for the creation of the new "Chunky Dunky's" sneakers. You can read more information about this and other collaborations in the post: "Ben and Jerry's latest popular collaborations".

The latest peak, and the one with the most media impact, was in June 2020, with a total of 942,578 mentions. Ben and Jerry's decided to join the ad boycott against Facebook and Instagram that other companies such as Color Of Change, NAACP, ADL and Sleeping Giants had already started with the #StopHateforProfit movement. The termination of their ads within these social platforms in the United States was a consequence of the use of these platforms to spread and amplify racism and hate by their users. The intention of this campaign was to pressure Mark Zuckerberg's company to take serious action on the matter.

Subsequently, Ben and Jerry's launched a statement on its official twitter account where it gave its support to all those brands that wanted to join this campaign. In addition, the chief executive of the company confirmed its proposal to increase the diversity of its employees internationally as a consequence of the demonstrations and protests that had increased in the United States.

Likewise, the focus on Facebook increased when Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, took appropriate measures to reduce misinformation and hate speech on its social platform. Currently, this social network no longer allows political advertisements.

KEY CONCEPTS

When analysing the key concepts that have been most used throughout these years related to the brand, we realize that, just by looking at these concepts, we could not determine that it is a brand of ice cream. The founders have been so involved in social activism to fight for human rights that the ideology is more important than the ice cream product itself. Concepts such as supremacy, prison system, black employees, opportunity or basic response were the most used when talking about Ben and Jerry's on the internet.

SENTIMENT

For this reason, it is logical that the sentiment of 43% of users when talking about the brand is negative, not because of the product itself, but because the brand is mostly used to defend human rights.

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Sources:

https://search.digimind.com/ds/hs8/dhs/trend#{"query":"ben%20and%20jerry's","duration":"Last%2024%20months","mention_type":[-1],"lang":["en"],"country_code":[],"time_zone":"Europe/Madrid","from":"2019-11-26T00:00:00","to":"2021-11-26T23:59:59","ageRange":"ALL","sort_field":"reach","sort_order":"desc","min_age":-1,"searchId":4}