Ben & Jerry's - Japan

Description

The CEO of Ben & Jerry's Homemade, Inc. needed to give sales and profits a serious boost; despite the company's excellent brand equity, it was losing market share and struggling to make a profit. The company's product was on store shelves in all U.S. states, but efforts to enter foreign markets had only been haphazard with non-U.S. sales accounting for just three per cent of total sales. The CEO needed to focus serious attention on entering the world's second largest ice cream market, Japan. An objective of Ben & Jerry's was to use the excess manufacturing capacity it had in the U.S., and it found that exporting ice cream from Vermont to Japan was feasible from a logistics and cost perspective. The company identified two leading partnering options. One was to give a Japanese convenience store chain exclusive rights to the product for a limited time. The other was to give long-term rights for all sales of the product in Japan to a Japanese-American who would build the brand. For the company to enter Japan in time for the upcoming summer season, it would have to be through one of these two partnering arrangements.

Keywords

Corporate strategy International marketing Market entry Strategic alliances