Häagen-Dazs’ identity over the time

Juliette Delquignies
Sep 27, 2021
3 min read

Updated: Nov 29, 2021

Most people would suggest that Häagen-Dazs was named after its Danish inventors, M. Häagen and his friend M. Dazs. If you believe in this theory, you should read this article.

Where does Häagen-Dazs come from?

The story of Häagen-Dazs started in 1921 with a young polish-Jewish boy, Reuben Mattus, selling Eskimos made by his mother in the streets of the Bronx, New-York. In 1929, his mother and him started selling chocolate ice-creams bars and sandwich under the brand Senator Frozen Products. For 30 years, sales were increasing until the family business faced a price war from mass-producers.

In response to this growing competition, Reuben Mattus, with the help of his wife Rose, decided to create Häagen-Dazs, in order to offer high-quality ice-cream: rich and creamy, with less air and without preservatives ingredients.

“Häagen-Dazs”, where does this come from then?

The use of this name was an idea from Rose and was purely marketing. With this Danish-sounding name, they wanted to benefit from the good reputation of Danish products in the U.S.A by that time and be perceived as good quality and European home-made.

Häagen-Dazs unique recipes enhanced the brand’s reputation and no advertising campaign where necessary, as word of mouth was doing the work. By that time, the products were only sold in gourmet stores in New-York. However, they rapidly extended to the East Coast.

In 1976, the first Häagen-Dazs retail store opened in New-York. The success permitted the fast opening of new stores over the United-States.

The brand’s value proposition

The brand positioning is mainly based on its products and service differentiation, as well as their luxury brand strategy. Häagen-Dazs is targeting adults who love luxurious flavors, which is in accordance with their premium price strategy.

Today, authenticity, engagement and quality are the principles that guides the brand. All the employees are guided by the vision of the creator, Reuben Mattus, to “make ice-cream like no others”.

The brand claims to be dedicated to great ice-cream that reaches perfection, to have extraordinary shops by making them extra tempting, to be devoted to the highest standards by using the best ingredients for the ultimate flavors, to reduce its impact on the environment by different means, and finally, to procure an experience like no other.

Since 2017, the brand got a new look!

In the recent years, Häagen-Dazs has worked hard on its brand image, with the help of “artists from all over the world”. The goal? Create a unique design for each flavor, based on how they felt: crunchy, soft, creamy, delicious, and because the brand seriously needed a breath of modernity!

They owe these changes and design to the agency LOVE, based in Manchester. While ice-creams have always kept their high-quality image, the brand’s packaging and wider identity was not so modern and in adequation with the Instagram era, they needed to recapture young customer’s attention.

Thinking about the story of the brand, they decided to follow the dreams of Reuben Mattus, and got inspired by the elegance of Scandinavian design, reintroducing simplicity, balance, and proportion.

LOVE aimed to make every pack an object of desire. They also worked on the logo, to make it simplified in the spirit of Scandinavian restraint. They then changed the black and gold for an elegant mono burgundy version.

Finally, they also help the brand refresh its stores, using the brand story. They created “the kind of ice cream shops our audience would want to see – and be seen in”. The stores are now connected to the packaging identity, still with Scandinavian and “Instagramable” designs.

The work of the agency had a real impact on the brand’s sales and showed great results. Indeed, the brand experienced a 66% sales increase in the UK, as well as a 100% increase in Ireland. The social media grew by 500% and the overall brand by 37%.