Now, with Ben and Jerry relegated to the role of mascots and the multinational corporation Unilever at the helm, the ice cream giant they created is hardly an underdog. Home of the infamous Doughboy and owners of Haagen-Dazs ice cream, Pillsbury tried to elbow Ben & Jerry�s out of the market and intimidate them with a flurry of legal threats.Ĭohen and Greenfield reveled in the attention, spun it as a Fortune 500 Goliath versus two hippie Davids, and trotted out the slogan that would forever be associated with the transformation of their fledgling venture: �What�s the Doughboy Afraid Of?�
Their biggest break en route to being multi-millionaires had to be the legal harassment they received in the mid-1980s from the Pillsbury Corporation.
Ice cream was their product, but marketing was their game.Ĭohen and Greenfield loved nothing more than a public relations battle with big, bad corporate lawyers. In the end, though, they proved to be better at bringing home the loot than most of their button-down brethren. For more than 15 years, they were the counterculture hippies in the corporate world. It�s no secret that Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield made a fortune playing the underdog.
