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When Quality Isn't Everything

Great Midwestern Ice Cream produces a private-label product for supermarkets.

What do you do if you build a better mousetrap and no one cares?

Let's pretend.

Say you and your friends find yourself in a place where there are lots of mice, but not enough cats. What do you do?

Why, you build a (better) mousetrap, of course.

Now that's simple to say, but hard to do. After all, you don't know much about mice and even less about building traps. But you keep at it. You're confident that if you succeed, the world will reward your ingenuity, even though you're out in the middle of nowhere -- say, Fairfield, Iowa, a city of 9,200 people who live a good hour and a half from Cedar Rapids.

So you keep fiddling with springs and types of bait, until you finally think you have THE ANSWER. And maybe -- in our fantasy, anyway -- you do. We'll say People magazine hears about your work and calls it the "Best Mousetrap in America."

Heck, let's keep the dream going. Why not have Playboy write that in a world of imitation, your mousetrap is the real thing. And as long as we have gone this far, let's go all the way. Let's imagine that while still President, Ronald Reagan -- a good midwestern boy himself, after all -- discovers your mousetrap and mandates that from now on, yours will be the only mousetrap used in the White House.

If it all came true, it would be better than a Frank Capra movie, wouldn't it? You'd appear on magazine covers; folks would ask you for your autograph; and you'd be frolicking with Robin Leach on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."

Well, if you substitute ice cream for mousetrap you have the oversimplified story of The Great Midwestern Ice Cream Co. People did say it made the best ice cream in America. Playboy was even more effusive, and President Reagan did serve it at the White House. (Despite reports that he loved the blueberry, here's the real scoop. "Dutch" is a vanilla man.)

So with all this by way of background, you're prepared to hear about how The Great Midwestern Ice Cream Co. -- a 12-person manufacturing operation started when the founder couldn't find any decent ice cream in Iowa, a state with more cows than people -- rose from rags to riches. From laughingstock to ice-cream laureate, from . . . well, from however else those clichés go.

And Lord knows, we'd love to tell you all about it.

But we can't. By the time you read this, it will be virtually impossible to buy a pint of Great Midwestern. The company is now making ice cream for other people. Out of necessity, it has gone into private labeling.

"What happened was we built our whole marketing campaign around our quality; we put the quotes from Playboy and People on everything that came out of here, and we discovered quality is just not a positioning statement," says company president Josh Roberts, 33.

That's a bit harsh, but Roberts has a point, one applicable to everyone who knows they have a better product, but are still waiting for the world to beat a path to their door. First off, the word "quality" has been so debased as to be meaningless. Absolutely everyone today promises quality. Second, Roberts's industry makes competing on quality particularly difficult. If people are going to pay $2 a pint for gourmet ice cream -- which, roughly defined, has a lot more butterfat and a lot less air than the half gallon you buy down at the supermarket -- quality is a given, and rightly so. Häagen-Dazs, Ben & Jerry's Homemade, and Frusen Glädjé all make good ice cream.

So Great Midwestern's sales plan was doomed from the start. "We were coming late to market with what consumers saw as a me-too product," says Roberts. Distribution had been locked up. Häagen-Dazs (owned by Pillsbury Co.) and Frusen Glädjé (Kraft Inc.) had no problems getting shelf space. And after Ben & Jerry's won its highly publicized distribution dispute with Häagen-Dazs, many grocers were willing to stock it, too. But then they shut the freezer case. After all, how much superpremium ice cream could they sell?

Repositioning Great Midwestern was a possibility, but the good images were taken. Häagen-Dazs ads imply that the product is elitist. Serving Ben & Jerry's after dinner tells friends you're hip.

Other options? "Well, given that they make a good ice cream, especially in some unusual flavors like blueberry, I'd forget about national distribution. They don't have the capital," says Mark Stevens, president of The Häagen-Dazs Co. "I'd concentrate on the Midwest, and I'd become a strong regional player."

That, says Jamie Vollmer, Great Midwestern's executive vice-president, won't work. "If you look at where the superpremiums are strong, it is basically on the two coasts. People in the Midwest are just not going to spend $2 a pint on ice cream. We could own the Midwest and still not have a business."

So we're back to square one, with Great Midwestern finding itself trapped in a box that contains many small companies. The product is fine -- maybe even better than the competition's -- but not enough people care. There isn't money for a massive advertising campaign, which might help. And selling out is no longer an option. As demand for superpremium ice cream cools, thanks to concerns about cholesterol and the widespread introduction of frozen yogurts, the days of hypergrowth are over -- and interest in buying small ice-cream companies melts.

So what do you do?

Turn your marketing plan on its head, say Vollmer and Roberts.

Instead of trying to get people to recognize the name Great Midwestern, they plan to spend the rest of their days hiding their light under a bushel.

It is, they say humbly, a perfect solution.

"We have a great product, but instead of concentrating on that, we were spending all our time trying to get distribution," says Roberts. "By concentrating on the private-label business, we won't have to get distribution. The supermarkets will give it to us, since we will be making the ice cream for them. We won't have to market, because the stores will do that for us, and we won't have to worry about building up a name, because there won't be a name to build up. All we have to do is make great ice cream. The plan capitalizes on our strengths and eliminates our weaknesses."