OPINION: Mills on ... Ben & Jerry's.(Brief Article)

Like all of us, I suppose, I have a strong set of brand prejudices. By prejudices, of course, I mean the things I love to hate, often for reasons that don't stand up in the cold light of day. It may be unfair but what's the point of a prejudice if it isn't a) violently held and b) irrational?

One of the things I really loathe is that oxymoron, corporate cool, usually most visible in a brand's advertising. You probably know what I mean - it's when a mass brand or wannabe mass brand annexes the language, attitude and tone of a small niche brand in order to portray itself as being hip, cool, matey and all that stuff. Secretly though, you know that it's all the product of some giant MBA-dominated corporate infrastructure cranking out five-year plans for world domination with all the soul and passion you'd find among the occupants of a Manchester United corporate box. You probably know the names of the likely suspects: Gap, Benetton, Starbucks, parts of the Virgin empire and Nike.

The guilty set also includes one-time genuinely interesting and different brands that grow from niches into something mass market, often the result of a takeover by a giant corporation that wants a bit of that particular action or to remove a thorn from its side. In the process, they lose the thing that made them special, but the paradox is that they try all the harder to hang on to it and often focus their advertising around it.

Which brings us nicely to this week's particular subject, a new campaign by Fallon for Ben & Jerry's. There's probably no better example of the latter type of operation than B&J's. Twenty-five years ago, two Vermont natives, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, accidentally fell into making ice-cream. The pair looked like Grateful Dead roadies and ran their company in a similar vein: a strong commitment to ethics, a pledge to give 7.5 per cent of profits to charity, a set of quirky, hippie-style products (among them a Cherry Garcia flavour named after the chief Grateful Dead hippie), and an ...