I can has ice cream?

By simon | 26 January

I saw a status update from a friend of mine today asking ‘how good is cold rock?’ Now he’s a good friend of mine, but he’s from Yorkshire, and as far as I’m aware, the number of great ice cream makers that have come out of that northern county of England is fairly small, if not zero. So I can forgive him for his belief that the ice cream being served in Cold Rocks up and down Australia is of a high quality. I suspect he knows no different.

And neither am I one to pretend I’m an authority on premium ice cream but having worked with a small, but growing Brisbane-based concern called Shlix, I believe I can offer a more detailed insight into the quality and premiumness of Australian gelato.

However the differences between Shlix and Cold Rock aren’t the point of this blog post. The point is about how ‘standard’ brands can sell the illusion that they’re premium, as Cold Rock has done.

If you go into any Cold Rock, you’ll see damaged chairs, poorly maintained internal fixings, long queues and bad point of sale. Most of them have a few light bulbs broken or missing. The quality of the ice cream, the service and the entire experience is fortunately hidden somewhat by the end product and the brain’s ability to abandon its memory of the process you’ve just been through and rejoice with ‘o look, I can haz ice cream!’

I tried to think of other standard brand experiences that I could ever remember rejoicing over. Sure we’ve all had mini-burger orgasms over a hangover-satisfying McDonalds, but we all recognise that eating a Big Mac is, in no way, a premium experience. You don’t rejoice when you purchase own brand in Coles or Woolworths. Cheap wine is, well, cheap wine. And whilst you may be satisfied with a VB or XXXX, you know you’d rather have something with a European name and a fancy label to show people you know things about beer.

Even going to the cinema delivers two levels of experience. Avatar 3D might be sensational in the normal seats but you’re not dancing a jig because you’re in a row with people coughing, eating pop corn and talking on their phone. You’d really rather be in Gold Class.

So how does ice cream manage to generate this sense of excitement irrespective of its position in the market?

The simple answer is that when ice cream was originally created, it actually had its marketing built into the product. Take the first few lines of Wikipedia’s description of ice cream:

"Before the development of modern refrigeration, ice cream was a luxury reserved for special occasions. Making it was quite laborious. Ice was cut from lakes and ponds during the winter and stored in holes in the ground, or in wood-frame or brick ice houses, insulated by straw."

Essentially making the stuff was a pain in the arse and if you got any, you should consider yourself bloody lucky. How’s that for having your marketing built into a product? From its point of origin, the consumer was told they were lucky to enjoying this luxury, and that core marketing trigger exists to this day. When you’re faced with a dessert menu, a ball on a cone or even if you’re staring through the frosty window of cabinet in a petrol station, you can’t help emit a little yelp of glee.

This is probably the greatest example of scarcity as a marketing angle and the continuity of this illusion into mass production. We know Cold Rock isn’t going to run out of ice cream, but the illusion persists. Shlix is a different matter. A family-run business with (currently) limited storage capability, there perhaps is an urgency to enjoy while you can, irrespective of the cost. The test for Shlix when moving into a bigger production schedule is to maintain that exclusiveness. I’m pretty sure that won’t be a problem for them; the product has a quality that put up against someone like Cold Rock, they’d wipe the floor with them.

Think about your brand, your company and your product and see if exclusivity or scarcity can work as a tactic for you. Better still, if you’re creating a new brand, build that concept of ‘special occasion’ right into the brand. Make it hard to come by, hard to create or hard to find. Done well, it will outlast you and your brand.