Coldstone Creamery Culture

On a warm Friday night in June, three female college freshmen each have $10 to make the night enjoyable. One wants to see a show, one wants ice cream to cool off and the other cannot make up her mind. With the student tickets to the movies being $9.50, that leaves them with 50 cents left. Hmm, not enough for ice cream. While driving around they spot a line maybe a dozen people long, intrigued they stop to see what all the fuss was about. They hear familiar songs, but with different words being sung flowing through the air. When they round the corner they see it is for an ice cream shop. What is interesting to them is when they get closer they see the lines are mostly made of women just like them. They decide that this could be fun. So they wait and finally it is their turn to order, but it is hard. Twenty types of ice cream, and twice as many toppings sit in front of them. Finally they each decide on an ice cream to see it fly across the store onto a piece of marble. Then their toppings are mixed in by hand then tossed into a cup across the counter. They paid and since they enjoyed their time inline and the show that was presented they put their change in the tip jar. Soon as that change hits the bottom the employees burst into a song. Their night was complete, ice cream and a show. This is what Cold Stone Creamery is going for. Not just a new and entertaining way to enjoy ice cream but also one that is more designed for the customer that has a more distinct taste.

Approaches to marketing have changed with time just like the how the tastes of consumers have changed. When thinking about ice cream stores and how they go about marketing themselves to their target audience, one would think that it would be marketing itself to kids and their parents. However, “while family friendly, [Cold Stone Creamery] admits that its target audience is not ice cream’s traditional focus of kids, but rather 18 to 34 year old women.” (de Mesa) Their marketing strategy seems to go against what other ice cream stores, such as Baskin Robbins, have been following for decades, kids first adults second. Cold Stone Creamery is looking for a higher-class audience when trying to attract new customers by modeling itself after another retailer that tries to cater to a higher class of customers, Starbucks. While originally the stores had a “red and white tiled, slightly collegiate look, [however] the company has re-designed everything from the floor to the color of the ceiling. Walking into an old, un-retrofitted store is indeed like walking into an eighties’ time warp: no more memorable than the typical neighborhood ice cream or frozen yogurt shop.”(de Mesa) The newly retrofitted stores are more upscale in style and ambiance. “Overall, the re-branded Cold Stone Creamery is very unlike the kid-focused “scoop shop” model Baskin-Robbins has employed since the 1970s, the nostalgic, middle-America feel of soft-serve giant Dairy Queen, or the New England, down-home family fun of Ben and Jerry’s stores.” (de Mesa) This new style is one that makes the customer want to stay just a bit longer and enjoy their ice cream at the store than taking to enjoy elsewhere. The stores now even more evoke the feeling of Starbucks, but with a decidedly more feminine twist. The stores are more uniform than before, however each one is slightly different, but they all have the same characteristics throughout them, which include “slate floors, wood grain paneling, stylish cafÐ"© tables, sophisticated audio system and wine-colored walls with curvy, graphic accents.” (de Mesa) These are all changes that their target audience, women 18 to 34, would notice more than what kids, the perceived target audiences for ice cream stores, would.

Cold Stone Creamery has said that their vision is that they want “the world [to] know [them] as the Ultimate Ice Cream Experience by making [them] the #1 best-selling ice cream brand in America by December 31, 2009.”(Cold Stone Creamery) This is a bold statement by a company that is fairly new to the game. They only emerged onto the ice cream stage in 1988 with just one store in Tempe, Arizona. In 1999, “the company set a target goal of opening 1000 profitable stores by 2006; at that time they had 74.” (Cold Stone Creamery) They beat this goal by one year with the opening their 1000th store in Columbus, Ohio in 2005. “Today, it has 1,314 stores in 48 states, making it the No. 3 scoop shop chain, and is the sixth-largest ice cream brand. [They sell] more ice cream than Ben & Jerry's or HÐ"¤agen-Dazs. [This] year, [they expect] to pass McDonald's, then pass Baskin-Robbins in 2008. The chain aims, by 2010, to push aside Dairy Queen to be crowned the nation's No. 1 brand.”(AP) Their new stores are moving into areas that women are more likely to visit, such as malls and shopping districts. This model of setting a goal of total stores is not unlike the company they modeled their retrofitting after. Starbucks “set a new long-term goal to have 40,000 coffee stores worldwide, 10,000 more than its previous target and more than triple the current number.” (AP) Like the Starbucks model, they have even come up with their own names for small, medium, and large. Their version of the sizes are: Like It for small, Love It for medium and Gotta Have It for large. This gives a more sense of class to the company, but not having generic terms mixed in with their higher feeling of class.

Cold Stone Creamery’s target audience is one that demands a high quality of good and is willing to pay more for what they want. Unlike the traditional