Häagen-Dazs Vs Ben & jerry branding story: how they become Icons

Ben & Jerry's is a values-driven company that has become an icon . The dominant founder, Ben Cohen, is not an effective manager, but he brings creative marketing and product skills that have been important to the company's success. He also is controlling shareholder and the force behind the company's socially-minded culture. Ben & Jerry’s grew from a little local ice cream shop to a global brand and displayed a great of powerful branding in action. These are the marketing lessons of this company:
1. Have a story to tell, it is all about quality, local commitment and innovative/socially conscious ways to do business.
2. Stick to their principles. Ben & Jerry’s started out committed to certain core values and practices, and as they’ve grown (and even been bought by Unilever to aid the global expansion), they’ve stuck with them. B&J is committed to a social mission statement that should guide the way the company and the brand interact with the world. Their corporate social responsibility includes using Fair Trade certified ingredients. Fair-trade sourcing will be introduced across the entire range in Europe by the end of 2011, helping farmers to receive a living wage, work under ethical conditions and invest in their communities and businesses.
“Nobody wants to buy something that was made by exploiting somebody else,” said Jerry Greenfield, one half of the brand’s founding team.

3. Ben and Jerry realized, as they grew, that they weren’t the right people to scale the business. So they put the right people in place and continued to infuse the company with the unique perspectives that set it apart. Now, there are hundreds of employees and millions of customers carrying on the Ben & Jerry tradition.
(Source: Harvard Business School, http://hbr.org/product/ben-jerry-s-homemade-ice-cream-inc-keeping-the-mis/an/392025-PDF-ENG?Ntt=ben%2520%2526%2520jerry)

Reuben Mattus, a young entrepreneur with a passion for quality and a vision for creating the finest ice cream, started by solding fruit ice and ice cream pops from a horse-drawn wagon on the streets of New York. To produce the finest ice cream, he built a company and named it Häagen-Dazs. The choice of this brand name is explained by the willingness to evoke memories of the old-world European traditions of quality and fine craftsmanship.
The Häagen-Dazs brand quickly developed and its early success was created by word of mouth and praise. It was an immediate success, and its popularity led to a rapid expansion of Häagen-Dazs across the country then internationally.
The same dedication to perfection and high standards that made the Häagen-Dazs brand an icon continue to hold true today. The Häagen-Dazs brand philosophy is unchanged – use the finest, all-natural ingredients and craft them into the perfect balance of flavor and texture.
(source: Häagen-Dazs website)
The success of these two brands is explained by The mind-share and emotional /cultural branding paradigms claim that they embedded in the minds of their consumers.