Hippies hit back
They were both clever marketing ploys. A fancy European name and homemade ice-cream with the biggest-ever lumps. Both were winners. But as anyone who's tried to market products in the mainland will tell you, the key to making it really big is not your clever idea, but securing your distribution channels.
The BBC series Blood On The Carpet, which ATV has strangely decided to call merely The Business (ATV World, 10pm), has great fun in dramatising tonight's episode Ice-Cream Wars, in which Ben and Jerry, 'the original ice-cream anarchists' who opened the funkiest ice-cream parlour in America, take on the brand leader in the super premium market, the exotically-named but all-American Haagen-Daaz.
Ben and Jerry, portrayed as drop-out hippies when they started their venture, look as if they like their fattening food very much and this rather than any business experience obviously paid off when creating Ben & Jerry's. You've got to love your product to make it really, really good. It's why the French are so good at making wine.
Love, though, is not enough. The moral from this episode is that you've also got to come up with some pretty original ideas in war, too, and you won't find inspiration for these from any business book. Haagen-Daaz, part of the mighty Pillsbury corporation, was not to be challenged by any Ben or Jerry, so it pulled the plug on their distribution. It's simple. You just tell the key distributors that if they continue to carry that poxy little brand that's irritating you, you will remove your bigger, more lucrative product to another. It's what Americans are always complaining happens at the hands of state-owned distributors in China. It comes as some eye-opener that in the land of market freedoms, such tactics are employed to equally damaging effect.
Ben and Jerry's response was brilliant. They did what came naturally to a pair of old hippies - protest, very publicly, leaving Pillsbury with ice-cream all over its face. It was a classic business confrontation, but the drama is built up to make highly entertaining television. Never have convoys of ice-cream trucks looked so ominous.
For tonight's movie, adults must once again make do with a soppy children's film, in which Black Beauty (Pearl, 9.30pm) is re-invented as a spokesanimal for Friends Of The Earth. 'My mother told me that we had to share the grass with others,' he recalls, taking care not to trouble the spiders in his paddock. No, this isn't a real horse, however beautifully acted by an American quarter horse called Justin.